How Sleep Trackers Can Help (and Harm) Insomnia

How sleep trackers can help (and harm) insomnia depends entirely on how you're using them—and how they're using you. You wake up, reach for your phone, and there it is: your sleep score. 72 out of 100. Your watch says you got only 18 minutes of deep sleep. The app warns your "readiness" is low. Suddenly, the way you felt two seconds ago—maybe fine, maybe even rested—shifts. Now you're tired. Now you're worried. Now your entire day feels compromised because a device on your wrist decided you didn't sleep well enough.

This is the strange new territory of sleep tracking. About 35% of American adults now use electronic sleep-tracking devices, and the global market is projected to hit $58 billion by 2030. These devices promise insight, optimization, and control over one of life's most fundamental processes. For some people, they deliver exactly that. For others, they create a new problem: an obsession with perfect sleep that makes actual sleep nearly impossible.

The truth is, sleep trackers aren't inherently helpful or harmful. They're tools. And like any tool, their impact depends on how you use them—and whether you've honestly evaluated what they're doing to your relationship with sleep.

What Sleep Trackers Actually Measure (And What They Miss)

Before you can decide whether a tracker is helping or hurting your sleep, you need to understand what these devices actually do—and what they're guessing at.

How the Technology Works

Most wearable sleep trackers use a combination of accelerometers (to measure movement), heart rate sensors, and sometimes skin temperature or blood oxygen monitors. The device collects this data throughout the night, then runs it through proprietary algorithms designed to estimate when you were asleep, when you were awake, and which sleep stage you were in.

The key word here is estimate. Your Fitbit or Apple Watch isn't directly measuring your brain activity. It's making educated guesses based on indirect markers. When your heart rate slows and you stop moving, the algorithm assumes you're asleep. When your heart rate variability changes in certain patterns, it guesses you're in REM sleep. When you're very still with low heart rate, it decides you're in deep sleep.

The Accuracy Problem Nobody Talks About

Here's where things get interesting. Research comparing sleep trackers to polysomnography—the gold standard sleep study done in labs with electrodes measuring actual brain waves—shows a consistent pattern. These devices are quite good at detecting when you're asleep. Sensitivity rates typically hit 95% or higher. But they're much worse at detecting when you're awake during the night. Specificity rates range from just 18% to 54%.

What does this mean in practice? If you lie very still while awake—say, because you're trying not to disturb your partner or because you're anxiously attempting to fall back asleep—your tracker will often think you're sleeping. Studies show that devices consistently overestimate total sleep time and struggle to accurately distinguish between sleep stages.

Different devices also give wildly different results for the same night. A multicenter validation study found that wearables primarily misclassified wake as light sleep, while nearables (bedside devices) strongly misclassified REM as light sleep. One app in the study predicted 59% of sleep as deep stage when polysomnography showed only 10.8% actually was.

The accuracy issue matters because many people make significant life decisions based on this data. They cancel plans because their tracker said they got poor sleep. They panic about "only" getting 6% deep sleep without knowing that number might be completely wrong. The device creates a sense of precision that doesn't match its actual reliability.

When Sleep Trackers Actually Help with Insomnia

That said, sleep trackers aren't useless. For certain people in certain situations, they provide genuinely valuable information. The question is whether you're one of those people.

Pattern Recognition Over Time

The real strength of sleep trackers isn't in their nightly precision—it's in their ability to spot trends over weeks and months that you might otherwise miss. Maybe your sleep is consistently worse on nights when you have wine with dinner. Maybe you're getting to bed 90 minutes later on weekends than weekdays, and your Monday mornings are miserable as a result. Maybe your sleep improved dramatically after you started leaving your phone in another room.

These patterns are hard to see without data. And when trackers reveal them, they can prompt meaningful behavior changes. The key is using the device to notice broad trends, not obsessing over individual nights.

Can Sleep Trackers Support CBT-I Treatment?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia—CBT-I therapy—is the first-line treatment recommended by sleep medicine experts. One core component of CBT-I is keeping a sleep diary: recording your bedtime, wake time, and subjective sleep quality each day.

Some people find that sleep trackers make this process easier. A study combining CBT-I with wearable tracking found that the integration of subjective and objective sleep monitoring alongside therapy produced meaningful improvements in insomnia symptoms. The tracker automated part of the diary function and provided additional data points for therapists to use.

There's also a specific scenario where objective sleep data can genuinely reduce anxiety: paradoxical insomnia, also called sleep state misperception. This is a condition where people are convinced they're barely sleeping at all—sometimes reporting only an hour or two per night—when sleep studies show they're actually sleeping fairly normally. In these cases, seeing tracker data that shows 6 or 7 hours of sleep can provide reassuring evidence that contradicts the catastrophic story their mind has been telling.

But here's the critical distinction: these benefits typically occur when the tracker is used alongside professional treatment, not as a replacement for it. The therapist provides context, interpretation, and guidance that prevents the data from becoming just another source of anxiety.

Building Better Sleep Habits

At their best, sleep trackers can serve as gentle accountability tools. They remind you to stick to a consistent sleep schedule. They nudge you toward behaviors that support better sleep—winding down earlier, limiting screen time before bed, moving your body during the day.

For people who tend toward inconsistency or forgetfulness, these reminders can genuinely help. The tracker becomes a supportive structure rather than a judgmental overseer. It's there to gently redirect, not to shame.

How Sleep Trackers Can Make Insomnia Worse

Now for the other side. Because for a meaningful subset of people, sleep trackers don't support better sleep—they actively sabotage it.

What Is Orthosomnia?

In 2017, researchers at Northwestern University and Rush University Medical Center published a case series describing a troubling pattern they were seeing in sleep clinics. Patients were arriving not because they felt unrested, but because their wearable devices told them their sleep was poor. They trusted the tracker more than their own bodies. And they were spending excessive amounts of time in bed trying to improve their sleep scores—a strategy that paradoxically made their sleep worse.

The researchers coined a term for this phenomenon: orthosomnia. The prefix "ortho" means straight, right, or correct. Combined with "somnia" for sleep, orthosomnia describes the perfectionist pursuit of ideal sleep based on tracker data.

Dr. Kelly Baron, who led the research, noted that while many people want to improve their sleep, "the claims of these devices really outweigh validation of what they have shown to be doing." The patients weren't sleeping poorly because of underlying sleep disorders. They were sleeping poorly because they were trying too hard to optimize data from devices that weren't even accurate.

The Performance Anxiety Loop

Here's how the cycle typically works. You check your sleep score immediately upon waking. The number is disappointing—maybe a 68, maybe "only" 45 minutes of deep sleep, maybe a warning that your recovery is compromised. The device tells you that you won't feel good today, and suddenly you don't. You spend the day anticipating tonight's sleep with dread. Will you hit 8 hours? Will you get enough REM?

By bedtime, you're carrying all this performance pressure into bed with you. Sleep becomes a test you might fail. And because anxiety directly interferes with falling asleep, you create the exact problem you're trying to avoid. You lie awake monitoring your own mind, aware that every minute of wakefulness is ruining tomorrow's score.

The data starts dictating how you feel rather than reflecting it. Harvard Health researchers found that when people with insomnia were given false information about their sleep quality—told they slept poorly when they actually slept well, or vice versa—their mood and perceived functioning followed the fake data, not their actual experience.

Your tracker was supposed to help you sleep better. Instead, it's become the thing keeping you awake.

When Good Intentions Backfire

The behaviors that develop around orthosomnia make intuitive sense—they just happen to be exactly wrong for sleep. People spend longer in bed hoping to accumulate more sleep time, not realizing this reduces sleep efficiency and makes insomnia worse. They trust flawed device data over the actual clinical assessments or treatment recommendations from sleep specialists. They avoid social activities or adjust their entire lives around hitting perfect metrics.

Research on orthosomnia highlights three major risks. First, people overestimate how accurate their devices are, leading them to misunderstand their actual sleep quality. Second, the effort to maximize tracked sleep creates anxiety and arousal that directly worsens sleep. Third, reliance on consumer devices can delay people from seeking appropriate professional help, allowing insomnia to become more entrenched and harder to treat.

The irony is thick: a device marketed to improve sleep becomes the mechanism that destroys it.

The Psychology Behind Why Trackers Can Trigger Anxiety

Understanding why some people fall into orthosomnia—while others use the same devices without problems—requires looking at how these tools interact with certain personality patterns and cultural contexts.

Gamifying Something That Should Be Natural

Sleep is one of the few things your body knows how to do without conscious intervention. Babies don't need to be taught to sleep. Neither do dogs or birds or any other creature with a functioning nervous system. It's a biological imperative that regulation systems handle automatically when conditions allow.

But sleep tracking transforms this natural process into a performance metric. It turns rest into something you can win or lose at. Your Oura Ring gives you a score. Your Apple Watch tells you whether you're "ready" for the day. Your WHOOP calculates your recovery percentage. Sleep becomes another arena for optimization and achievement—and for potential failure.

For people who are already achievement-oriented, perfectionistic, or prone to health anxiety, this gamification creates what researchers call "the perfect storm for orthosomnia." You're trying to excel at sleep the same way you've learned to excel at work, fitness, or any other measurable domain of life. Except sleep doesn't respond to effort the way those things do. Trying harder to sleep makes you sleep worse.

The device turns something your body does naturally into another thing you might be failing at.

The Illusion of Precision

Part of what makes sleep tracking so seductive—and potentially so harmful—is the authoritative precision of the data. You don't get a vague sense that you slept okay. You get a score: 78 out of 100. You don't wonder whether you got enough deep sleep. You're told exactly: 1 hour and 12 minutes, which is 17% of your total sleep time.

These numbers create an illusion that there's a single correct answer to "how much sleep do you need" or "what counts as good sleep." But sleep specialists acknowledge there's no universal definition of optimal sleep. Quality varies based on age, health status, activity level, stress, and dozens of other factors. Even in professional sleep labs, experts interpret sleep data differently depending on context.

A composite sleep score can't capture this complexity. It reduces something deeply individual and context-dependent to a single number that gets compared to an arbitrary standard. And when you're already anxious about your sleep, that number becomes another source of distress rather than useful information.

The precision is false. But the anxiety it generates is very real.

Should You Use a Sleep Tracker If You Have Insomnia?

This is where we get to the part that actually matters: figuring out whether a sleep tracker is helping or harming your sleep specifically. Not sleep in general. Not someone else's sleep. Yours.

Red Flags That a Tracker Isn't Helping You

Here are signs that your relationship with your sleep tracker has crossed from helpful into harmful:

You check your sleep data immediately upon waking, and the numbers dictate your mood for the entire day. If a poor sleep score makes you anxious, frustrated, or defeated—even when you felt reasonably rested before checking—the tracker is creating problems it claims to solve.

You trust the device more than you trust your own body. If your tracker says you slept poorly but you feel fine, and you decide the tracker must be right and you must be wrong, that's a warning sign. Your body's signals—energy levels, mental clarity, mood stability—are more meaningful than any algorithm's estimate.

Forgetting to wear your tracker creates significant anxiety or panic. If you feel genuinely distressed about missing a night of data, the device has moved from being a tool to being a crutch or even an obsession.

You've started sacrificing other parts of your life to hit sleep metrics. Declining social invitations to get to bed early. Canceling morning plans because your tracker said your recovery is low. Lying in bed longer than you want to try to accumulate more tracked sleep time.

Sleep has become performance-based rather than restorative. If you're going to bed focused on "achieving" eight hours or hitting a certain sleep score rather than simply resting, the tracker has transformed sleep into another source of pressure.

How to Use Sleep Trackers Without Falling Into Orthosomnia

If you want to keep using a tracker but prevent it from harming your sleep, here are some protective boundaries:

Stick with one device consistently. Don't compare data between different trackers or apps. Devices vary significantly in their measurements, and comparing them will only generate confusion and anxiety. Pick one, accept its limitations, and use it for general trend-spotting—not absolute truth.

Focus on weekly or monthly trends, not nightly perfection. One rough night means very little. What matters is the pattern over time. Are you generally getting enough sleep? Are there specific factors that consistently correlate with better or worse rest? Look at the forest, not the trees.

Check your data once, at a specific time—not repeatedly throughout the day. Set a boundary. Maybe you look at your sleep data with your morning coffee and that's it. Not at lunch. Not before bed. Not every time you're bored. Limiting exposure prevents the data from colonizing your entire day.

Prioritize how you feel over what the numbers say. If you feel rested and your tracker says you didn't sleep well, believe your body. If your tracker says you got great sleep but you feel exhausted, that's the more important information. The subjective experience is real. The tracker data is an approximation.

Take periodic breaks from tracking. Once a month, try a week without wearing your device to bed. Notice whether you sleep better or worse. Notice whether you feel more or less anxious. Use these breaks to recalibrate your relationship with the technology.

When to Skip the Tracker Altogether

Some people simply shouldn't use sleep trackers, at least not right now. If you're prone to anxiety, perfectionism, or health-related obsessive thinking, a sleep tracker might do more harm than good. The same traits that make you want to optimize your sleep make you vulnerable to orthosomnia.

If you're currently in active treatment for insomnia, talk to your therapist before using a tracker. Sometimes they're helpful as part of how CBT-I actually treats the underlying patterns. Other times they interfere with the treatment process by keeping you focused on data rather than on retraining your sleep system.

And if you've tried using a tracker and found that it consistently generates more anxiety than insight, that's important information. Not every tool works for every person. There's no shame in deciding that for you, the cost exceeds the benefit.

The best sleep "tracker" is often remarkably simple: Do you generally feel rested during the day? Can you function reasonably well? Are you meeting your responsibilities and engaging in life? If yes, your sleep is probably fine—regardless of what any device says.

You Need to Evaluate What This Tool Is Actually Doing

The question isn't whether sleep trackers are good or bad in some absolute sense. They're not. They're tools with the potential to be either helpful or harmful depending on how they interact with your particular brain, your particular patterns, and your particular relationship with sleep.

For some people, a fitness tracker provides useful pattern recognition without triggering obsession. For others, the same device becomes a source of nightly anxiety that transforms sleep from a natural process into a performance metric they're failing at. The technology doesn't determine which category you fall into. Your honest evaluation of its impact does.

If you're struggling with insomnia and you're not sure whether your tracker is part of the problem, try this experiment: put it away for two weeks. Notice what changes. Do you sleep better or worse? Do you feel more anxious or more relaxed? Is bedtime easier or harder? The answer will tell you what you need to know.

And if you discover that the tracker was creating more problems than it solved, that's valuable information. It means why therapy might be what you actually need—something that addresses the actual patterns maintaining your insomnia rather than just generating more data about it.

Because in the end, the goal isn't perfect sleep metrics. It's actual rest. And those are not always the same thing.

If you're curious about what to expect in your first CBT-I session or whether treatment might help with comorbid insomnia and depression, those are questions worth exploring. Not every sleep problem needs a device. Some just need a different approach.