Human Performance & Health › Sleep & Recovery › Sleep Optimization Without Obsession

This page covers the one documented case of sleep tracking going wrong that the sources on this site describe, and points to the pages that carry the evidence on sleep timing, environment and stages.

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Orthosomnia

Sleep clinicians have described patients who sought treatment for sleep problems they had diagnosed from their own tracker data, in what the authors called a “perfectionistic quest for the ideal sleep in order to optimize daytime function,” and who often found the tracker data “more consistent with their experience of sleep than validated techniques” such as polysomnography. The authors named the pattern orthosomnia (Baron et al., 2017). It is a case series, not a measure of how common the pattern is.

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Where the Evidence on Sleep Factors Is

• Timing: light timing, wake time and caffeine timing (Khalsa 2003; Gooley 2011; Drake 2013)
• Environment: light, temperature and bedroom air (Harding 2019; Sleep Foundation; Strøm-Tejsen 2016)
• Physiology: sleep stages and cycles (NHLBI; NINDS; Dijk & Czeisler 1995)
• Disruption & Debt: short and broken sleep, and the signs of sleep apnea (Van Dongen 2003; Benkirane 2022; NHLBI)

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What Comes Next

→ Continue to Daytime Recovery, Stress Load & Capacity Management.

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GoldBlock Workshop is educational. We explain how the body works and what the research says. We do not diagnose, treat, or give personal medical advice. Talk to a qualified professional about persistent sleep or recovery problems, especially if symptoms are severe or ongoing.

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Sources and further reading

• Baron et al., “Orthosomnia: are some patients taking the quantified self too far?” Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (2017). PubMed