The fitness watch that’s supposed to be monitoring your sleep could be the exact thing that’s keeping you up at night, say experts, who suggest that the popular wearable devices that, among other things, track how long you sleep, could fuel insomnia among people prone to waking up at 3am in a cold sweat of anxiety.
“Sleep tracking can have positive effects for some people to become more aware of their sleep and adjust their behaviour to result in better quality sleep, but there is a danger that the feedback can have the opposite effect by introducing worry among those who have a tendency towards anxiety,” Professor Gosia Lipinska, a neuropsychologist at the University of Cape Town, told the Sunday Times.
Her colleague, Professor Dale Rae, a UCT physiologist and director of the Sleep Science Institute, said one problem was that the devices can give a wrongly negative assessment of how a person is sleeping, and make them worry for no reason.
They are good at reflecting sleep patterns but not as accurate when it comes to recording the stages of sleep, she said. How you feel and perform during the day is still the most reliable measure of whether you have slept well.
“An obsession with trying to perfect sleep can create a problem that was never there to start with, known as orthosomnia. Negative feedback can disturb people’s sleep more and influence their mood,” Rae said.
She and Lipinska have conducted a trial on how sleep tracking affects the behaviour of healthy sleepers, which is due to be published soon.
They said the increasing awareness of the importance of sleep and incentives by medical aid wellness programmes to improve sleep habits were welcome, but fitness watch users should be aware of the potential downside.
According to The Sleep Factor: A Data-Led Blueprint for Better Health, a report by Discovery Health that analysed 47m sleep records, “insufficient and irregular sleep patterns” raise the risk of early death by 22% and can contribute to diabetes, obesity, heart disease and depression.
Wits University sleep scientist Prof Karine Scheuermaier, head of the university’s Brain Function Research Sleep Lab, who is experimenting with tracking using an Oura ring, warned that tracking could cause stress for insomniacs and people with anxiety and obsessive conditions.
Sleep health tools are “designed for the average person and none of us is average”, said Scheuermaier, who is a member of the South African Society for Sleep and Health along with Rae, Lipinska and others.
Rae said she sometimes tells people “to put their watch away” and take a break from tracking.
Adolescents, particularly, should not be tracking sleep unless they are in a sleep programme, said Lipinska. “They are very impressionable and negative feedback can be potentially damaging.”
At the launch of Discovery’s sleep report last month, Vitality CFO Dr Mosima Mabunda said: “Sleep is not a luxury… it is one of the most potent, yet underutilised ways to reduce cardiometabolic risk.”
She said this had spurred Vitality into getting members to pay attention to their sleep, through tracking with watches or a ring, and improve their habits.
Momentum’s Multiply wellness programme rewards good sleep. Using its app, members can scan their fingers with a smartphone camera and get a “recharge score” based on their resting heart rate and other indicators. This is designed “to help members assess sleep quality and physical recovery”, said Momentum Multiply head Maria Carpenter.
While wearable tech is evolving rapidly, watches cannot accurately analyse all the stages of sleep, said Rae. For example, people should spend about half the night in stage 2 of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, which is often reported simply as “light sleep”. Devices are better at reporting REM and deep sleep.
“Sleep cannot and will not be perfect all the time and we need to let that go,” she added.
TimesLIVE article – Fitbit? Oura? Or just count sheep (Restricted access)
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