Quest for ‘perfect night’s sleep’ with sleep tracker can cause problems

If a good night’s sleep is good, wouldn’t a perfect night’s sleep be better? Not necessarily, according to doctors.

“Sleep trackers can provide value, but it’s best if you don’t fixate on it,” said Keisha Sullivan, a sleep medicine physician with Kaiser Permanente in Largo, Maryland. “You can end up creating sleep issues, focusing on your stats every day that the sleep tracker is telling you.”

Sleep trackers are often wearable devices, including watches or rings, that connect with phone apps and computer software.

“They can use things such as movement, heart rate and other biometrics to give us a general idea of how well we slept the night before,” Sullivan said. “But, I wouldn’t get held up on what the numbers say each night, because it’s not 100% accurate.”

With the growing social media trend of people sharing details of their sleep, that can lead to orthosomnia — anxiety achieving the “perfect night’s sleep,” which can worsen sleep quality and lead to increased medication use.

“Just use your sleep tracker to get a general idea of maybe how many hours of sleep you got that night,” Sullivan said.

While most people have trouble sleeping occasionally, sleep disorders are better-diagnosed by a sleep study conducted in a medical facility.

Sometimes doctors have a patient do a home sleep study, in determining whether a lab-based sleep study should be conducted for serious conditions, including sleep apnea.

Chronic sleep deprivation can lead to increased risks of heart disease, weakened immune function, weight gain and cognitive decline.

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Neal Augenstein

Neal Augenstein has been a general assignment reporter with º£½Ç¾«Æ·ºÚÁÏ since 1997. He says he looks forward to coming to work every day, even though that means waking up at 3:30 a.m.

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