Orthosomnia. That’s the name for obsessing over having the perfect sleep, and it’s a hell of a good word.
Also, it turns out that a lot of us are orthosomniacs given the booming market in sleep apps.
You can, of course, do proper sleep studies in a lab where you get covered in sensors that measure everything about you – your heart rate, your movement, your breathing – in the least comfortable and natural environment possible.
So many of us go for the cheaper and more convenient option of using sleep apps, which largely use the internal gyroscope in the phone to measure how unsettled we are at beddy-byes.
And now actual sleep experts are warning that sleep apps aren’t perhaps as accurate as we might hope, much like actual fitness experts keep saying annoying things about how we taking ten thousand steps a day doesn’t actually have the effect that we think it does and YES WE GET IT JANE.
There are question marks about the veracity of the data, and the very act of having a phone in your bed is attributed with having disrupted sleep whether that’s increasing tendency to look at it, or having lights flash on or vibrations letting you know that the thing’s recharged because when else are you going to do it?
“People will shell out 200 bucks for some sleep device, but we’re not willing to just shut off our phones and go to bed,” Dr Seema Khosla, medical director of the North Dakota Centre for Sleep, told the New Daily.
And maybe that’s the lesson here. You should use your sleep app if you like and look at the general trends, but don’t obsess over the details.
And maybe just hurl your phone into the corner and see if that doesn’t help you get some proper shuteye.