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Sleep Trackers Can Make Your Insomnia Worse

Friday June 14, 2019. 12:00 PM , from Slashdot
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.

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