I got addicted to tracking my sleep – here’s how I stopped being obsessed with a perfect sleep score

Sleep has always been a top priority for me. I tend to get at least eight hours of sleep a night, fall asleep quickly and rarely wake up once my head hits the pillow. But earlier this year, I had the worst bout of stress-induced insomnia that I’ve ever experienced, and it was all down to tracking my sleep.

Sleep trackers have many benefits, including giving you valuable insights into your sleep patterns, and identifying sleep or health issues that you may not have noticed. But tracking your sleep can get addictive which is something I experienced while testing a smart ring.

I loved testing the Luna Smart Ring Gen 2 which is why I gave it five stars in my Luna Smart Ring Gen 2 review. While I enjoyed the app, easy controls, battery life and fitness tracking, its sleep features were where it really shined.

After wearing the Luna Smart Ring Gen 2 to bed, the app would be filled with sleep analytics when I woke up the next day. This included the different sleep stages I cycled through during the night, as well as sleep duration and quality, and areas I could improve upon.

After publishing my review, I continued wearing the Luna Smart Ring Gen 2, and still find it to be an amazing smart ring. But then I had a solid two weeks of the worst sleep of my life. I woke up multiple times in the night with my heart racing and found it hard to go back to sleep, and my sleep results definitely reflected that.

One thing I noticed most in my sleep records was I had low levels of HRV while sleeping. Heart Rate Variability measures the time and fluctuation between your heartbeats, and low levels of HRV are linked to stress, illness and fatigue.

As someone who has anxiety, stress isn’t new to me but I’d never experienced stress around sleeping before. During the two weeks I wasn’t sleeping well, I wasn’t sick and only started to feel tired after a few days of disrupted sleep so stress had to be the main factor for my sleep interruptions.

But here’s the thing – because I wasn’t getting a good night’s sleep and I was worrying about the next day’s sleep report, I was keeping myself awake and shocking myself out of sleep because of this stress. It wasn’t the smart ring’s fault but mine, as I’d become so obsessed with tracking my sleep that I was actually ruining it.

One night, I woke up again with my heart racing and finally just took the ring off. I avoided wearing it to sleep but continued using it for the other features and manually inputted my sleep instead. This meant I didn’t get a full sleep analysis but the Luna Smart Ring Gen 2 still calculated my readiness score for the day and recorded other vitals.

After I stopped tracking my sleep so thoroughly, I noticed a big difference in my sleep quality and quantity. Call it ‘ignorance is bliss’ but by not fixating on my sleep score, I got back into a good sleep routine and haven’t had these issues since.

Sleep tracking addiction isn’t uncommon, and many people experience what is called ‘orthosomnia’. Identified in a study conducted in 2017, orthosomnia is a non-clinical term that refers to an unhealthy obsession with getting perfect sleep. Most common in people using sleep trackers, orthosomnia causes heightened anxiety and poor sleep quality due to overanalysing data and pressure to get the perfect sleep score.

I definitely experienced orthosomnia, so after my bout of terrible sleep, I decided I needed a sleep tracking detox – and here’s how I did it.

3 things I did to stop my orthosomnia

To get rid of my orthosomnia, I started by having a break from tracking my sleep. In my case, this meant I only wore the Luna Smart Ring Gen 2 during the day to track my steps, heart rate, calories and activity, but I took it off to sleep. I found this made a huge difference as I wasn’t overthinking what my score would be while I was meant to be sleeping.

Next, I prioritised the rules of good sleep hygiene, which included going to bed at the same time every night, not scrolling through my phone, reading a book to wind down and avoiding caffeine late in the day.

Finally, I made sure to focus on how I was feeling rather than having data tell me. Some mornings, I woke up feeling refreshed but then checked my sleep score and realised I’d slept worse than I’d thought. This would confuse and worry me which just became a vicious cycle of stressing about sleep and sleeping about stress. Paying more attention to how I felt helped quiet my mind and enjoy sleep again.