The Sleep Tracker Might Worsen Your Insomnia Situation

Mandy Seth


It causes inaccurate data and stats obsessions which might lead to self-diagnosed sleep disturbances.

A sleep tracker is a special tool that helps to keep track of your sleep patterns and find out whether you had a good night or not. Nowadays, wearing wearable sleep tracking devices is rapidly expanding over the world. Unfortunately, this tool might cause self-diagnosed sleep disturbances with unneeded anxiety. The New York Times has published a study to reveal that these sleep tracking apps or devices can cause to wrong data, influence your insomnia and bad-temperature. The study also states out an example that in order to boost sleep stats, users tend to spend too much time in bed and create non-existent data about their sleep, resulting in the wrong circumstances after all.

A sleep tracker is a special tool that helps to keep track of your sleep patterns.

However, it doesn’t mean that these trackers are unreliable. To excuse for these findings, some sleep tracking manufacturers promptly defend their products. Dr. Conor Heneghan - head of innovation in Fitbit - explain for his product that few users have serious sleep anxiety and Fitbit's sleep tracker can produce data that emphasize the consistency of sleeping schedule and bad habits. The product also can record heart rates and movement of users during different sleep stages. Unfortunately, after all, the product is just a machine, an assistant tool and couldn’t be accurate as a human being - said by Fitbit’s representative. In this company’s own research, the equivalence between Fitbit’s sleeping tracker and specialized medical equipment (for example a cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia) is 70% in comparison with 90% of humans. Similarly, this matched rate is varied amongst different sleep tracking devices. 

Which means that the data from sleep trackers might somehow have their own advantage, but the disadvantage in causing some insomnia problems are also obvious. So, you may want to have a second thought in using these types of sleep tracker, limit it or even avoid it altogether.

Next Story