SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Wearable sleep tech, like smart watches or rings that take real-time health metrics, have made it super easy for the average snoozer to track their sleep from one night to the next. But is all that data giving you more rest or more stress? Life Kit reporter Andee Tagle investigates.
ANDEE TAGLE, BYLINE: One of the first things that Dr. Ravi Aysola often tells his patients is that insomnia, that is, trouble falling or staying asleep, is normal, at least from time to time. There's no need to fear the occasional bad slumber.
RAVI AYSOLA: Whether you're particularly stressed or excited, perhaps, or anxious. What we want to avoid is a chronic pattern of insomnia, and I think that has significantly worsened in our society for a number of reasons.
TAGLE: Aysola is a clinical professor of medicine, and the director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at UCLA. Among some of the modern threats to our sleep, he says, over-caffeinating, irregular schedules and the abundance of sensory input from our environments and our tech. And Aysola says there's an increasingly common issue to add that list, a condition called orthosomnia.
AYSOLA: It's a huge problem. I think all sleep physicians have experienced this. A patient comes in, and - well, what's the reason you're coming in today? Well, my tracker tells me I'm not getting enough X, Y, Z sleep, you know, slow-wave sleep or deep sleep or REM sleep.
TAGLE: Aysola says sleep trackers, like the kind on your phone or health ring or smart watch, can be very helpful for identifying patterns in your sleep, especially for people being treated for acute or chronic levels of insomnia. But they can also create a lot of sleep anxiety.
AYSOLA: The fear that I'm not going to sleep, and what are the consequences of that going to be the next day? How am I going to perform? And that pattern is very activating to our nervous system. It sets us on kind of the high alert, fight or flight kind of path, and that's not compatible with sleep.
TAGLE: That kind of thinking can lead to a slow sleep score, can lead to staying in bed longer to try and force it, can lead to more stress, can lead to even less sleep, can quickly spiral into a pattern of insomnia. Trackers can make it easy for you to want to gamify or perfect your sleep. But...
AYSOLA: It's not something that has to be achieved. And especially personality types that are focused on, you know, fixing problems and, you know, coming up with solutions, that sometimes is a hard place to get to.
TAGLE: If you're set on tracking, Aysola says make sure to have a set goal in mind. Maybe you're trying to get at least seven hours every night, or you want to see how your new workout schedule is impacting your rest. Whatever you're aiming for, when you wake up each morning...
AYSOLA: Feel your body first.
TAGLE: As in, before you check your tracker, tune in. Are you energized or could you sleep for another three hours? Is your brain foggy and full of cobwebs or is that morning run calling your name? Don't let those sleep scores skew your memory.
AYSOLA: This told me that I had a bad night last night, and I remember waking up X number of times and tossing and turning, and I feel terrible today. And the tracker kind of confirms that. I think that is meaningful information to at least tell you that this is matching up with how I feel.
TAGLE: To get the clearest picture, you want to log your data over a longer period of time, like, weeks or months, not just days. And if you find your numbers aren't matching up with your experience on a consistent basis, you could consider talking to your doctor or just ditching your tracker because you don't need tech to keep tabs on your sleep. Paper and a pen by your bedside work well, too, and are actually standard practice in many insomnia treatment programs because they can help you focus on the feeling of your rest, rather than the data. And Aysola says remember, that's the important part.
AYSOLA: Persistent insomnia is not out of your control. The real goal is to try to take that power away from the devices and the things that drive our fear and anxiety and bring that power back internally, being able to self-regulate to allow sleep to happen. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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