"The perfectionist quest to achieve perfect sleep is similar to the unhealthy preoccupation with healthy eating, orthorexia," its authors wrote. A 2017 paper by sleep tracker researchers coined a new condition among sleep tracker users: Orthosomnia. Heck, even an accurate reading can increase anxiety. In sleep, as in so much, the placebo effect is real.
A 2020 study, which told participants they'd had 5 hours sleep when they'd actually had 8, and vice versa, came to the same conclusion. One study in 2013 deliberately fed its participants the wrong sleep data, and noted that they did exactly as well on cognitive tests as their fake data predicted. Credit: MediaNews Group / Boston Herald via Getty ImagesĪnd that matters, because an inaccurate sleep reading can ruin your waking life. Even the supposed gold standard of headband-based sleep tracking - like the Zeo or its descendant, the Muse S, which look directly at brain activity - are inaccurate around 10 percent of the time. Test any sleep tracker for a good chunk of time and you may find a hilariously false reading: a Fitbit that thinks you're asleep when you're watching a movie, a smart mattress pad that can't tell the difference between your movement and your partner's. "It's known to be a fuzzy standard," Oura Chief Product Officer Chris Becherer admits. But is more technology really the best solution for the average sleeper? Is it making the problem worse? And can something as simple and low-tech as a timer work just as well, if not better? Each of the high-tech devices mentioned above uses different algorithms to guess at which sleep stage your body is in, and the results can vary wildly. It's one of the top four things you can do for your health, and we're doing it less and less, especially during the pandemic. We're not great at sleeping in the modern world, admittedly. Amazon won permission from the FCC last year for a curious and/or terrifying device that tracks sleep via radar. And when it comes to services to sell, we're just getting started. Many of these services also require subscriptions - suggesting that if you want the best quality sleep, you'll have to keep ponying up for the rest of your life.
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You can now buy app-connected Bluetooth-based sleep headbands (the Muse S), sleep-tracking smart rings (led by the Oura 3, which I reviewed for a month here), wristbands (like the Whoop), smart watches (the Apple Watch series 6 tracks sleep directly, and its predecessors can use a variety of third-party apps), smart pads that go on your mattress and can detect snoring (the Withings Sleep), apps that promise to turn your phone into a smart pad, entire smart mattresses (the Pod Pro by Eight Sleep), and a not-at-all creepy Google Nest Hub that judges how well you're sleeping by pointing a camera at your torso and a mic at your mouth. If the current explosion of sleep tracking gadgets is anything to go by, Zeo may simply have arrived a decade too early to cash in: The era of apps is where the money's at.
Yet it couldn't persuade enough of us perpetually sleep-deprived humans to strap one on - Zeo went out of business in 2013. Zeo's tracker was a sophisticated piece of lab-grade tech that broke your sleep down into four stages (awake, REM, light, and deep), and gave you a single consumer-friendly "ZQ" score every morning.
It had two components: a headband I couldn't forget I was wearing, and a bedside clock/charger that was so damn bright it broke another cardinal rule of good sleep (make sure you're bedding down in as dark an environment as possible). Hard for a night owl like me to hear, but it was the most useful data I gained that day: Science tells us that sticking to the same sleep schedule every night is one of the best things we can do for our bodies. "You should always sleep on east coast time," was his reply.
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I was based on the west coast, and asked Zeo's sleep expert, who coached NBA players on optimal sleep, how to deal with my frequent jet lag. The event was in New York, where my then-employer flew me once a month. Not many people remember the Zeo sleep tracker these days - but I still recall how tired I was at its launch event in 2009.
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