The Hard Work of Good Sleep
Each night, millions of people turn to Fitbits, Apple Watches and sleep apps in a quest for the perfect night’s sleep. Or at least better sleep. The maker of Pokémon sees an opportunity in the growing market of sleep trackers, and has announced plans for Pokémon Sleep in 2020.
“The concept of this game is for players to look forward to waking up every morning,” said Tsunekazu Ishihara, the company’s chief executive.
Hoping to create the same kind of viral moment as Pokémon Go in 2016, Pokémon Sleep will track sleep patterns and change the game based on how long the user sleeps, and what time he or she wakes up.
But researchers warn that the quest for ideal sleep, or to catch Pokémon, can be counterproductive. In some cases, people are spending an excessive amount of time in bed trying to increase their sleep numbers, which may make their insomnia worse.
Raphael Vallat, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said sleep apps give an incomplete picture of sleep quality because they cannot measure the stages of sleep.
He told The Times that actively tracking your sleep can create anxiety that interferes with a good night’s rest.
“If you look at your data, it can modify the perception of your sleep,” Mr. Vallat said.
For The Times’s Brian X. Chen, sleep tracking just put him in a bad mood.
Mr. Chen, a consumer technology writer, tried a variety of trackers over the course of two weeks. The results were underwhelming.
“Ultimately, the technology did not help me sleep more,” wrote Mr. Chen, who says he usually gets less than six hours of sleep a night. “The data did not help me answer what I should do about my particular sleep problems.
“I’ve felt grumpier since I started these tests,” he added.
Data can offer insights into our sleep patterns, but some people may have genes that make getting a restful night’s sleep easier.
For as long as he can remember, Brad Johnson has never been able to sleep more than six hours a night. He always wakes up without an alarm. He always feels rested and ready for the day. “If you paid me $100,000 to sleep eight hours tonight, I couldn’t do it,” he told The Times.
Mr. Johnson has six other family members who happily get by with less sleep than is recommended. Researchers found that they were all carrying the same gene, ADRB1, which influences how much sleep people need.
This gene shows up in about one in every 25,000 people, Dr. Louis Ptacek, one of the researchers and a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Times. Another gene identified by Dr. Ptacek affects the timing of sleep rather than its duration.
Just as night owls are getting to sleep, about 3 in 1,000 “extreme morning chronotypes” are waking up to start the day. These people suffer from advanced sleep phase, “a kind of permanent jet leg,” The Times’s Jane E. Brody wrote.
“The problem is, we know so little about what sleep really is and what it’s for,” Dr. Ptacek said. “As we identify more and more genes, hopefully this will outline a system, or systems, that are critically important to sleep.”
Apps and trackers may not be as useful as some hope, but Pokémon Sleep, one person says, is not the solution.
“‘Making sleep fun’ is a concept that could only exist today, when nothing is considered enjoyable or even valid unless it contributes to some secondary economy,” Ian Bogost, a video game designer and the author of the book “Play Anything,” wrote on Twitter after Pokémon Sleep was announced.
He added that people would eventually need such games “to make fun-making more fun.”