We’re maxxing everything these days—looks, tokens, fibre—so why not sleep?
The very practice of sleepmaxxing, or optimising for sleep, could be ruining it. And the proliferation of biometric tracking and wearables that promise to help users achieve perfect sleep is taking things even further, contributing to the rise of a distinctly modern ailment called orthosomnia.
If orthosomnia sounds familiar, that’s because it shares the same Greek root (“orthos,” meaning “correct”) as its counterpart, orthorexia. Both indicate fixations with health that tip into the unhealthy. One of them refers to eating, and the other refers to sleeping. Neither is formally recognised by the American Psychiatric Association as a standalone diagnostic category.
Even so, discussions about orthosomnia, or an obsession with achieving perfect sleep hygiene, are gaining traction, according to a report from the BBC. And professionals say the biometric-tracking wearables – like smartwatches, smart rings, and screenless trackers from companies like Garmin and Google – that are driving that obsession are quite possibly having the opposite of their intended effect.
The term “orthosomnia” was coined in a 2017 paper published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine by researchers affiliated with Northwestern University and Rush University Medical School. They pointed to “a growing number of patients” who were seeking treatment for sleep disruptions they had self-diagnosed, based on data from wearable devices. At the time, researchers estimated about 10% of US adults were using wearable fitness or sleep-tracking devices.
“The patients’ inferred correlation between sleep tracker data and daytime fatigue may become a perfectionistic quest for the ideal sleep in order to optimise daytime function,” the study notes. “The challenge for clinicians is balancing educating patients on the validity of these devices with patients’ enthusiasm for objective data.”
As of 2024, the number of US adults using wearable devices had ballooned to as high as 41%, according to a survey study published earlier this year. Also in 2024, a cross-sectional study attempted to estimate the prevalence of orthosomnia in the broader population. The study had a number of limitations, but concluded that about 2% of the population could be suffering from it.
Performance coach Sam Neame, who works with executives and elite athletes through his company, Sam Neame Performance, says managing stress is among the most important factors when pursuing a good night’s sleep. Tracking sleep metrics with wearables can add unnecessary pressure to something “that should be completely natural.”
“We start putting more and more energy into analysing sleep, how long we slept, how much deep sleep we got, our score, our recovery, and suddenly sleep becomes something we feel we need to perform,” he writes via email. “Unfortunately, the more we try to control and optimise it, the more difficult sleep can become. What started as a tool to improve sleep can therefore become part of the problem.”
Neame doesn’t personally track his own sleep, and he recommends his clients steer clear of sleep-tracking devices at least seven days prior to big events or competitions.
For those who do want to track, he recommends checking metrics at night, rather than in the morning, or – better yet – at the end of the week.
“If an athlete wakes up and sees they had less deep sleep than expected, they can start the day believing they are under-recovered, even if they actually feel fine. That can create unnecessary anxiety around sleep, and, ironically, make sleep itself harder,” he says.
A recent class-action lawsuit has also raised questions about whether or not sleep-tracking devices are accurate. The lawsuit, filed late last month in San Francisco, accuses the US$11bil (RM44.48bil) maker of Oura Ring of falsely advertising the device’s sleep-tracking technology.
“Oura Ring claims to provide consumers with a holistic sleep health analysis, but the ring doesn’t actually produce an accurate score of an individual’s sleep quality. Yet people are making real health decisions based on that feedback,” class counsel Shireen Clarkson of Clarkson Law Firm said in a statement.
Oura Health, for its part, has pushed back on the allegations that it has misrepresented the transparency of its sleep-tracking technology. “Oura Ring estimates sleep stages” by leveraging a variety of physiological signals “like other consumer sleep wearables,” a spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company has “transparently reported on the mechanisms and measures” that feed its sleep-staging technology.
“We’re committed to continuing to clearly communicate what Oura measures, what it estimates, and how members should use that information,” the spokesperson told Inc. – Inc./Tribune News Service
