My Fitbit obsession ruined my sleep

Finds out that knowledge isn’t always power

Dr Google isn’t medically trained. We know this but it doesn’t stop us googling minor symptoms and terrifying ourselves that a stiff knee, watery eyes or patchy rash could actually be something terminal.

Now there’s also a world of wonderful gadgets out there aiming to make us part with hard cash for a DIY diagnosis.

While there’s something to be said for taking responsibility for our own health, monitoring your scores can quickly become an obsession, as I’ve learned the hard way.

I come from a long line of hypochondriacs, but was fairly confident I’d avoided this time-consuming condition until five months ago when I got a smartwatch.

My incentive was mainly to keep an eye on my exercise, especially in lockdown, as I was keen to up my walking and become the dog’s favourite.

However, it was the watch’s in-built sleep tracker that quickly caught my eye. The Fitbit would automatically rate my night out of 100, breaking it down into a score that rated from fixated p poor to excellent. Previously, I h had delighted in being the w world’s greatest sleeper, d disturbed through the years o only by tiny babies and occasional periods of worry about sick relatives.

So when I logged in to check out my “sleep score” I almost passed out. Apparently I wasn’t the splendid snoozer I’d always believed myself. In fact, only twice in the last five months have I managed to get a night it rated “good”. I’m mostly scoring “fair”, with a few “poors” along the way. It tells me I’m apparently awake often, with dodgy scores on REM (rapid eye movement, aka dreaming) and deep sleep most nights. Twice I’ve slept so poorly it didn’t register any score at all. I was devastated. Constant urging from the watch to “aim for eight hours” doesn’t help.

As a result, I’ve become obsessed with my sleep to the extent it’s keeping me awake. In the night I find myself worrying about a poor score and when I stay up late, I stress about missing the optimum time for nodding off.

In a panic, I have found myself trawling through internet articles linking lack of sleep to dementia, early death, cardiovascular disease and, ironically, high blood pressure, among multiple other unpleasant fates.

Slumber has always been my family’s super power – I have four children in part because they all slept so well as babies. It doesn’t help that some of them now wear Fitbits, which has introduced competitive sleeping to our household.

It is almost amusing that something which should help my wellbeing and aid my sleep is inadvertently making it worse.

I’m far from alone in wondering if knowledge isn’t power. Dr Mann, author of the Haynes Sleep Manual, says: “As with most things, when it comes to insomnia, we have created a problem to some extent. What we are yearning for is not normal. Our natural sleep pattern is an interrupted few hours followed by a break, followed by a few more interrupted hours. Yet if this is what we experience, we think there is something wrong.

“Ancient people did not suffer angst about this because they did not expect to get one solid block of rest. There’s a whole industry built around the perfect night’s sleep, but the quest for eight solid hours is not natural.” If anyone is wondering if there’s a word for my problem, there is – orthosomnia, coined in 2017 in the US by medics who found that sleep tracking prompted sleep disorders in people obsessed over their scores.

There must be a balance between keeping a sensible eye on my health and becoming a slave to the numbers, but I’ve yet to find it.

Something that’s meant to aid sleep is inadvertently making it worse

Joan is