You slept fine. But then you checked your smartwatch.
In 2017, a group of researchers coined a term, orthosomnia. It was the clinical name for a new kind of anxiety they had been seeing in their clinics. Patients would show up obsessed with the sleep metrics from their smartwatches and tracking rings.
But when doctors actually studied them, many of these people were sleeping perfectly well. The anxiety often came from the fact that their sleep score suggested something was wrong.
Dr Kelly Glazer Baron was one of those researchers. In the nine years since, these devices have surged in popularity, with more than a third of Americans now saying they have used one to track their sleep.
So is all this tracking just stressing us out? And why did so many of us decide to optimise something as unpredictable as sleep in the first place?
