Caroline Tompkins/Refinery29, Getty Images
When trying to develop healthy habits, awareness usually helps. So it’s easy to see why sleep tracking devices that claim to reveal what happens to users while they’re on the go have become popular among people looking for better rest. These promise to monitor not only your sleep duration, but also the depth and quality of your sleep. It also provides insight into how much energy you can expect to feel the next day.
Most sleep scientists warn that the data recorded by these devices is unreliable, but regardless of whether the information they provide is reliable or not, focusing too much on the numbers can lead to poor sleep quality. You may become overly concerned about the quality of your products. This obsessive approach to optimizing rest, coined the term orthosomnia, only tends to make the situation worse. In other words, data overload can keep you up at night.
If you want more shut-eye, there’s another reason to avoid focusing on what happens when the lights are off. That’s because you’re missing the big picture. Good sleep is fundamental to our long-term health, but as we explore in our special issue beginning with “The New Science of Sleep: How to Sleep Better No matter Your Lifestyle,” good sleep doesn’t end in your bedroom. It’s not something you can get.
An obsessive approach to optimizing sleep will only make things worse
Let’s take dieting as an example. A growing body of evidence suggests that a healthy gut microbiome leads to better sleep quality, and vice versa (see ‘The surprising connection between the microbiome and good sleep’). So if you want to sleep better, what you eat is important.
It’s also remiss to expect our sleep requirements to be the same every night, or the same as everyone else’s. We understand that our needs are individual (see Why your chronotype is key to knowing how much sleep you need) and can vary with factors such as age and hormonal fluctuations. Increasingly, we are learning that hormones are both (see Understanding Hormones). Sleep can improve both. ”)
So while you can of course improve your sleep time by approaching your actual sleep time (for more personal tips from the experts, see 9 sleep researchers’ tips for getting the best sleep All of these things suggest that we can improve our sleep time. You need to create the perfect bedtime conditions and realize that it is not just the unconscious time that defines good sleep. What we do while awake can also make a big difference.
topic:
