Imagine you wake up and feel well-rested after a night’s sleep. But before even getting up from bed, you take a look at your sleep tracker that says you did not complete your nighttime goal, which upsets your mood for the rest of the day. Now, you might be cranky about not getting the ‘right’ amount of shuteye.
This unhealthy obsession to attain the ‘perfect’ sleep is known as orthosomnia. On World Sleep Day, let’s understand what it is and how it harms us. Orthosomnia is a concept used to describe obsession with sleep data to get a ‘perfect’ score, usually triggered by a wearable device.
The term was coined by US researchers in a study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. With the advancement of technology, there are now devices that let us track sleep. They help interpret data with charts and summaries, telling how long we slept, woke up and spent in each sleep cycle.
They also give a sleep score. But monitoring your daily sleep and worrying about achieving a ‘perfect’ score could be counterproductive. Orthosomnia is not a medical diagnosis, but gamifying our sleep every night to attain the highest score could lead to sleep disorders like insomnia and mental health issues such as anxiety.
“For some people, it really can create an anxiety spiral that makes things worse,” New York University (NYU) Langone Health clinical psychologist Thea Gallagher, told GQ magazine last year. “We’re a data-informed culture now, and it can be helpfu.
