Episode notes
There is a clinical term for this and once you have it you will start seeing it everywhere, possibly in yourself: orthosomnia. Coined in 2017 for patients who were convinced their sleep was broken — not because of how they felt, but because of what their tracker told them.
We go through what your device is genuinely good at, and what it cannot do. When eleven consumer trackers were run against clinical polysomnography across three hundred thousand epochs, the best device reached about two-thirds agreement on sleep stages. The worst was far below that. That number in your morning chart is an estimate wearing the costume of a measurement — and it is telling you how to feel about a night you already lived through.
SOURCES:
Baron, Abbott, Jao, Manalo & Mullen — Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self Too Far? Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2017;13(2):351-354
Accuracy of 11 Wearable, Nearable, and Airable Consumer Sleep Trackers — prospective multicenter validation study
Written and fact-checked by Brent Burgess. Narration uses a synthetic voice model of his own voice.
This episode is general education and is not medical advice. Sleep problems can have serious underlying causes — talk to your doctor before changing medication, supplements, or treatment.