The Sleep Tracking Paradox: Why Monitoring Your Sleep Might Be Keeping You Awake
I’m fairly convinced that tracking my sleep is making me tired. As I’ve aged, sleep has progressively slipped through my fingers, elusive and mysterious. In a quest to understand why I can't seem to rest for more than a few hours, I turned to a sleep tracking device. This miraculous doohickey grants a daily "Sleep Score," assessing three sleep categories. Every morning since first clasping the device to my wrist, I immediately fumble for my phone to check my score.
For the uninitiated, there are three sleep stages. Light sleep makes up most of your sleep. This is evidently my comfort zone, my Cheers, if you will. Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is important for memory and mood; it’s when your dreams are most vivid. REM sleep is when you’re most likely to be in a canoe with Abe Lincoln and your 5th grade math teacher. Last but not least, there’s deep sleep.
Deep sleep has become my Ark of the Covenant. Every night I lay down to sleep, like a child on the night before Christmas, desperately hoping that tomorrow, my sleep stages readout will grant me the gift of having reached my deep sleep benchmark (12% - 23% of time asleep). In the six weeks since I’ve started tracking, I’ve reached that goal twice. That’s correct, two times. As such, I’ve done what any logical person in 2023 would do: gone down an internet rabbit hole researching how I can achieve more deep sleep. I’ve listened to and read some very interesting and some sort of kooky suggestions. Everything from checking my stools for parasites to taping my lips shut.
As we all know, checking the web for answers is often like drinking from a fire hose. Exploring and researching hasn't brought me any conclusive answers or effective interventions. (Although, admittedly I have yet to sample stools or seal my mouth). However, what I have noticed is that my level of tiredness the next day seems directly correlated with my sleep score. For instance, some days I will sleep for nine hours (not in a row, heaven’s no). I’ll wake up feeling refreshed, ready to be greeted with a ticker tape parade for the Valedictorian of sleep. Alas, if my score is just Fair, that excitement will immediately dwindle, and the yawns will set in.
A study published in 2011 in the Journal of Health Psychology revealed just how powerful our minds are. On two separate occasions, two sets of participants were asked to drink a milkshake. The first time, they were told that the shake was “indulgent” (e.g., a 620-calorie milkshake). The next time, the shake was presented as a 140-calorie “sensible” shake. Spoiler alert: it was the same shake. Blood tests revealed that when the participants thought they were drinking the indulgent shakes, they released significantly less ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Perception shaped reality.
Today, I woke up after a fitful night, convinced that my sleep score would be in the dumps. I was amazed to see that I’d actually gotten more deep sleep than I ever had. Indeed, I’d met all benchmarks. Well, guess who was singing with sprightly vitality in the shower? The same gal who had just dragged her near-dead-from-exhaustion carcass into the bathroom.
Here's the billion-dollar idea: a sleep gadget that declares you've slept like a newborn every morning. Production as a society guaranteed to skyrocket; just think of all the energy we’d have!
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