Sleep Trackers Can Make Your Insomnia Worse 53
Some sleep specialists are warning that the apps and devices that are used to track your sleep may provide inaccurate data and can exacerbate symptoms of insomnia. "Fiddling with your phone in bed, after all, is bad sleep hygiene," reports The New York Times. "And for some, worrying about sleep goals can make bedtime anxiety even worse." From the report: There's a name for an unhealthy obsession with achieving perfect sleep: orthosomnia. It was coined by researchers from Rush University Medical School and Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in a 2017 case study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. Dr. Kelly Baron, one of the paper's authors and the director of the University of Utah's behavioral sleep medicine program, said that sleep trackers can be helpful in identifying patterns. She herself tracks her bedtime with a Fitbit. But she said she had noticed a trend of patients complaining based on unverified scores, even for things like the amount of deep sleep, which varies by individual.
In the case study on orthosomnia, researchers found that patients had been spending excessive time in bed to try to increase their sleep numbers, which may have made their insomnia worse. And they found it difficult to persuade patients to stop relying on their sleep trackers, even if the numbers had been flawed. Researchers say that trackers can overestimate the amount of sleep that you get, particularly if they focus on tracking movement. If you are lying awake in bed, the tracker might think that you're asleep. While devices that track heart rate or breathing give a more complete picture, they are still only generating estimates.
In the case study on orthosomnia, researchers found that patients had been spending excessive time in bed to try to increase their sleep numbers, which may have made their insomnia worse. And they found it difficult to persuade patients to stop relying on their sleep trackers, even if the numbers had been flawed. Researchers say that trackers can overestimate the amount of sleep that you get, particularly if they focus on tracking movement. If you are lying awake in bed, the tracker might think that you're asleep. While devices that track heart rate or breathing give a more complete picture, they are still only generating estimates.
I sleep well at night... (Score:1)
...because I am confident that my $50,000 a year job in IT in San Jose will be there when I wake up the next day. Plus I get a Christmas bonus.
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What seems to make sleeping harder is knowing that you know you have a hard time falling asleep. So you try to fall asleep your mind is racing on trying to sleep.
But our ability to fall asleep is more complex then our political/economic conditions. Even with a $200,000 year stable job, and you are not worried about your financial problems. Your personal first world problems will still keep you awake.
Most of the time things that are racing in my mind preventing me from falling asleep are not real problems a
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I too worry about the consistency of the Star Trek timelines.
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Trying to make sense of Star Trek Cannon, In Star Trek Enterprise they took 2 weeks to get to the Klingon home world at warp 4.5 old warp scale. But that will mean the Empire is right next to earth, due to the size of space.
Yeah, I'd call that a serious problem.
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Ever been shot with a cannon? In space?
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What seems to make sleeping harder is knowing that you know you have a hard time falling asleep. So you try to fall asleep your mind is racing on trying to sleep.
But our ability to fall asleep is more complex then our political/economic conditions. Even with a $200,000 year stable job, and you are not worried about your financial problems. Your personal first world problems will still keep you awake.
Its not just problems that will do it.
I have insomnia (specifically an inability to get back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night) and rarely am I kept awake by problems (I know and accept my FWP are FWPs and that things like Brexit are beyond my control). Many times I'm lying awake because I'm thinking of really odd things like who was that actor who played the bad guy in the latest Johnny English film and where have I seen him before?
Anxiety based insomnia is easily treated, it's ones
Cart Before The Horse (Score:1)
This seems like an example of technology looking for a reason to be used. Some bright creative sort came up with the idea of a Sleep Tracker, and a rationale for how it might be therapeutic got shoe-horned in.
I don't see how it could help (Score:3)
You're looking at the data after the fact and then trying to guess at what could have caused that, micro analyzing and micro managing your bed time sounds like it adds pressure and second guessing to what should be a simple routine. Body scanning or mindful meditation should probably be the most thinking you do about/before bedtime.
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You're looking at the data after the fact and then trying to guess at what could have caused that, micro analyzing and micro managing your bed time sounds like it adds pressure and second guessing to what should be a simple routine.
Next you're going to tell me that gamification doesn't increase employee happiness or productivity.
Simple (Score:1)
Sleep when tired. Eat when hungry. F*ck when horny. Piss when full. Defecate when full.
How hard can it be?
Re:Simple (Score:4, Funny)
Similar Findings with Exercise (Score:2)
Re: Similar Findings with Exercise (Score:2)
I find that I sleep the best if I leave the tablet and phone in another room away from the bed. The bedroom is a dark sleeping chamber that I descend into for restful sleep.
Doing it wrong (Score:2)
What you actually do with the data is up to you. I collect it just for shits and giggles and to see if my sleep patterns change depending on the season, business trips and that sort of stuff. It’s interesting to see how the jet lag wears off depending on w
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Orthosomnia (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know about others, but I go to bed when I'm tired, and wake up when I'm done resting. This comes out to 5 hours a night. Less than 5, and I feel like crap. And more than 5 doesn't happen unless I have a cold. But I don't worry because I'm "missing" those 3 extra hours every night.
Here's the anti-strawman: Humans, such as we are, are all slightly different in many physical aspects. The amount of sleep we need is in that mix. An individual is pretty likely to need the amount of sleep that they need, and not the amount dictated by someone who doesn't even know you, or by some fitness tracking device programmed to track sleep.
It's like demanding that a person must defecate X number of times a day. Which is another neurosis many have. That's why we have Jamie Lee Curtis making commercials so that people crap the right amount of times per day. And why we have gummi-bear "probiotics".
Relax, people, Life is too short to be stressing about how much time you spend unconscious,
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Yes and no. To get a little bit meta on you, isn't it true that just as different people need different amounts of sleep, different people also have different needs in terms of active monitoring of their sleep? Some, like you, are better off just trying to relax and not stress about the time they spend sleeping, but others actually do benefit from the certainty that comes from an accurate measurement. It kind of feels like you're trying to advocate your own one-size-fits-all solution ("Just relax and sleep
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Yes and no. To get a little bit meta on you, isn't it true that just as different people need different amounts of sleep, different people also have different needs in terms of active monitoring of their sleep? Some, like you, are better off just trying to relax and not stress about the time they spend sleeping, but others actually do benefit from the certainty that comes from an accurate measurement. It kind of feels like you're trying to advocate your own one-size-fits-all solution ("Just relax and sleep when you're tired") while at the same time objecting to another one ("sleep 8 hours a day").
O geesh, what kind of world is it when a person says everyone is different, so you sleep what you need, and it's turned into one size fits all.
Certainty. There's the issue. A person that craves certainty might find some sort of peace in knowing exactly how many hours they sleep. But then they might just stress if in life, they have to stay up an hour later, and not get the exact 8 hours their device tells them they need. That need for precision and certainty over process that is definitely not precision
Re:Orthosomnia (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of us have real sleep problems and have to fix them. I slept an hour a day on average for over a year; my milestones included waking up one day feeling like I was on heroin, and never feeling like I wasn't on heroin again.
Humans, such as we are, are all slightly different in many physical aspects. The amount of sleep we need is in that mix. An individual is pretty likely to need the amount of sleep that they need, and not the amount dictated by someone who doesn't even know you, or by some fitness tracking device programmed to track sleep.
Here, I've got an experiment for you; safety glasses on.
Track your sleep for a week. Take your time asleep--light, deep, whatever--and divide it by your time in bed. That's your sleep efficiency. Be aware that Fitbit tracks micro-awakenings (restlessness) as awake, and you won't remember these; they are, as far as I can tell, equivalent to light sleep, and Fitbit reports less sleep than you're really getting (about an hour for me).
If your sleep efficiency is less than 80%, move your bedtime to a point where you're only spending 15 minutes longer in bed than you are sleeping. Set a fixed wake time and wake up then every single day.
Whenever you maintain over 90% efficiency for a running week, move your bedtime back 15 minutes. If you fall below 80%, move your bedtime forward.
Eventually you'll stop going over 90%. You'll be in bed long enough that you just can't sleep that long. You might need to wake up in the middle of the night, wander around for a half hour or so, and then go back to sleep; don't count that as time awake.
Now you know how much sleep you need. Also your insomnia is under control and you're sleeping as well as you're going to sleep without tiagabine or some future drug like Suvorexant with a 1.5-hour half-life.
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Some of us have real sleep problems and have to fix them. I slept an hour a day on average for over a year; my milestones included waking up one day feeling like I was on heroin, and never feeling like I wasn't on heroin again.
Oh man - that really sucks. What is the issue, and is it permanent? An actual sleep problem is something else. There are some pretty scary ones, like apnea, fatal familial insomnia, and narcolepsy, which mainly needs understanding. I know three people with narcolepsy, embarrassingly, I was pretty good at invoking them to a nap. In person I have a soothing and relaxing voice. So I learned to speak loudly. But yeah, I'm talking about a normal spectrum of sleep.
Humans, such as we are, are all slightly different in many physical aspects. The amount of sleep we need is in that mix. An individual is pretty likely to need the amount of sleep that they need, and not the amount dictated by someone who doesn't even know you, or by some fitness tracking device programmed to track sleep.
Here, I've got an experiment for you; safety glasses on.
Track your sleep for a week. Take your time asleep--light, deep, whatever--and divide it by your time in bed. That's your sleep efficiency. Be aware that Fitbit tracks micro-awakenings (restlessness) as awake, and you won't remember these; they are, as far as I can tell, equivalent to light sleep, and Fitbit reports less sleep than you're really getting (about an hour for me).
That wouldn't work for me very well - My Ice Hoc
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What is the issue, and is it permanent?
ADHD and some other stuff, comorbid with primary insomnia. The insomnia is pretty weak: if I exercise (diet is not necessary for me) to a high degree (like destructive, the body has to heal each day), I sleep pretty hard. I have a mental disorder that causes some odd things, so my emotional responses are weak, and I'm disconnected from them anyway...which means I can float between mania and depression and not notice or care (depression can be terrible or relaxing). Mania causes the brain to naturally d
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It's like demanding that a person must defecate X number of times a day. Which is another neurosis many have. That's why we have Jamie Lee Curtis making commercials so that people crap the right amount of times per day.
Out of curiosity, what is the "correct" number of times someone should crap each day?
Of course there are different "experts", but one I have read says you should go the same number of times a day that you eat meals.
To me, it seems like once a day is enough. Three times a day? No thanks.
Humans are Bad with Data. (Score:2)
Humans are in general bad with data. We want to compare ourselves with other people even if they have different conditions. That guys fitness tracker says he always has over 10,000 steps a day. While mine is around 5,000 It looks like I need more steps, however to do that I need to stop weight lifting, because the tracker doesn't track that.
At work they measure how long a ticket is opened. Groups that have long running tickets, will close the ticket and track it an other way.
The problem is data is comple
Hardly (Score:2)
"Fiddling with your phone in bed, after all, is bad sleep hygiene," reports The New York Times. "
Sleep is important enough to get your bed its own phone.
Sounds like Drug Addiction. (Score:2)
Sounds like Heroin or Cocaine withdrawl.
I just wear it, not look at it (Score:2)
Matches my experience with all trackers. (Score:1)
The tracking mechanism damages my sleep, and I proceed to read how "great!" my sleep apparently was...then proceed to toss said device.
Worst was a forehead mounted unit. I'm a stomach sleeper that tosses and turns. Can't imagine why I got like zero sleep the one night I tried it and a 97% sleep rating from Zeos (or is it Zeros?).
Wrist based also makes my arm catch while sleeping. I'm an almost nothing on sleeper to prevent clothing from bugging me, so a huge thing on my wrist that creates pressure points
misguided use of $tool causes $shitshow (Score:2)
Fundamentally this is false attribution. Sleep trackers do not (yet) crawl onto the bed and jump up and down on your ribcage or lick your face to demand attention.
Maybe a better headline would have been: insomniacs commonly succumb to the derpderp hinterland.
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