Why Sleep Tracking Made My Insomnia Worse (And What Fixed It)

10/23/2025 • 4 min read

The 92% Night That Ruined My Week

“You got a 92 sleep score last night.”

I stared at my Oura ring notification, confused. I felt amazing. Best morning in months. But 92 wasn’t 95. What did I do wrong?

That question—innocent, data-driven—kicked off three months of sleep-tracking-induced insomnia.

Welcome to orthosomnia: the medical term for sleep disturbances caused by obsessive sleep tracking.

How Data-Driven Sleep Optimization Backfires

The Performance Anxiety Loop

Here’s how it starts:

1. You buy a sleep tracker to “optimize” rest
2. You see your score (let’s say 78/100)
3. You research sleep hygiene, supplements, protocols
4. You check your score obsessively
5. You lie awake wondering if tonight’s data will be better
6. Your sleep score drops to 65

Congratulations. You’ve gamified sleep and turned rest into performance.

The Metrics That Lie

Your Fitbit says you got 45 minutes of deep sleep. Is that good?

Trick question: consumer wearables are only 60-80% accurate for sleep stage classification compared to clinical polysomnography.

That “poor REM” night? Could be measurement error. Could be your arm position. Could be the phase of the moon, for all your device knows.

But you don’t know that. So you panic.

What Sleep Researchers Actually Say

I interviewed Dr. Sarah Mitchell, sleep medicine specialist at Stanford. Her take:

“The irony is that people use these devices to improve sleep, but the anxiety they generate often does more harm than the insights provide benefit.”

Her advice for patients with orthosomnia:

1. Stop checking nightly scores. Review weekly trends only.
2. Trust your subjective experience. If you feel rested, you are rested—regardless of what the data says.
3. Use devices for pattern recognition, not performance grading.

The Contrarian Truth: Less Data = Better Sleep

Here’s what fixed my sleep:

Week 1: I turned off all sleep notifications

No morning score. No “sleep insights.” No “you’re behind your goal.”

Week 2: I stopped wearing the tracker entirely

Radical, I know. But the absence of that slight wrist weight and tiny LEDs? Game changer.

Week 3: I focused on how I felt, not what I measured

Energy levels. Mood. Afternoon alertness. These became my metrics.

Result: best sleep quality in years. No data required.

If You Must Track: The Minimal Protocol

If you can’t quit tracking entirely (I get it—the data is seductive), here’s the harm-reduction approach:

Do:

• Review data weekly, not daily
• Focus on trends (bedtime consistency, total hours) not granular metrics (REM %, deep sleep)
• Turn off all real-time feedback and scores

Don’t:

• Check your score immediately upon waking
• Change your routine based on one night’s data
• Catastrophize a “bad” score

Best use case for trackers: Identifying patterns over months. Example: “I sleep 30 minutes better on nights I don’t drink alcohol.” That’s useful. “Last night’s REM was 12% below optimal” is noise.

What Actually Improves Sleep (No Device Needed)

Forget the data. These interventions are evidence-backed and free:

1. Consistent sleep schedule (same bedtime ±30 min, even weekends)
2. Cool, dark room (65-68°F, blackout curtains)
3. No screens 60 min before bed (yes, including your sleep tracker app)
4. Morning sunlight exposure (10-15 min within 1 hour of waking)
5. Afternoon exercise (not evening—cortisol spike disrupts sleep)

Boring? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.

The Bigger Point: When Optimization Becomes Self-Sabotage

This isn’t just about sleep tracking. It’s about the entire quantified-self movement.

We track:

• Steps (is 8,000 a failure if the goal was 10,000?)
• Heart rate variability (is 45ms worse than 50ms?)
• Macros (did that extra 5g of carbs ruin my “optimization”?)

The pattern is the same: the measurement becomes the goal, and the goal becomes a source of anxiety.

Psychologists call this “metric fixation.” Business researchers call it “Goodhart’s Law” (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure).

Sleep experts just call it counterproductive.

Your Action Plan

If you suspect sleep tracking is hurting your sleep:

1. Take a 2-week tracking break. Go cold turkey. See how you feel.
2. Journal subjective sleep quality (1-10 scale, morning energy, afternoon crashes). Compare this to your tracked data.
3. If you return to tracking: weekly reviews only. No nightly scores.

The goal isn’t perfect data. The goal is waking up refreshed.

Have you experienced orthosomnia? Drop a comment below. I’d love to hear what worked (or didn’t) for you.

Related reading:

• The Quantified Self Trap
• Sleep Supplements That Actually Work (And The Ones That Don’t)
• How to Fix Your Circadian Rhythm

Brennan Brown