| Today’s letter |
| The number that decides how tired you feel |
| In February 2017, a group of sleep doctors at Rush University Medical Center published a short paper about three of their patients. Each had arrived certain that something was wrong with their sleep, and each had brought the data to prove it: light sleep, restless hours, a score that came up short night after night. |
| The doctors needed a name for what they kept seeing in the clinic, so they wrote one down. Orthosomnia, from ortho, meaning correct. Their paper describes people chasing a correct night of sleep as a device reported it, and it notes that in some of those cases a clinical sleep study showing ordinary sleep did not settle the question. |
| “Why can’t I even get sleep right?” |
| You take this seriously. The ring or the watch was a sensible thing to buy, because you were tired and you wanted to do something about it, and you have followed every instruction that came with it: earlier bedtime, cooler room, screens down by ten. Most days you run a job and a house and other people’s schedules on whatever sleep you got. |
| Then the score comes up 61 and the day is settled before the coffee is made. A 61 reads like a verdict on you: other people manage this and you cannot, so the fault must sit somewhere in your own head… your racing thoughts, your stress, your discipline about bedtime. By ten in the morning you are tired, and now you have the data to explain why. |
| Here’s what gets me. |
| None of that was a failure on your part. |
|
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| Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study. |
| Researchers at Oxford recruited 63 adults from the community who met the clinical criteria for insomnia disorder. Everyone wore a watch overnight that worked like a sleep tracker. In the morning, at their usual wake up time, the watch handed each person a report on how well they had slept. |
| The reports were fake. Half the group was told their sleep had been good, half was told it had been poor, and which report a person got was assigned at random rather than measured. Everybody then went into an ordinary day, rating how they felt at noon, at three, and again that evening back in the lab. |
| What they found |
| Oxford, 2018. Gavriloff et al., Journal of Sleep Research. |
| Told they slept poorly (32 people) |
| By evening they rated their own thinking as duller and reported more sleepiness and fatigue, on the strength of a report that was never a measurement. |
| Told they slept well (31 people) |
| Same watch, same kind of night, a better report, and they rated themselves clearer and less worn out through the day. |
| Two lab tests of attention and reaction time found no difference at all between the groups. |
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| In other words, the report set how the day felt, and the report was not a reading of anyone’s sleep. |
| The night was the same for both groups. What changed was what they were told about it. |
| How does a made up number reach a person’s body by lunchtime? |
| A score arrives before you are properly awake, and it carries authority, because it looks like a measurement taken while you were unconscious. Most consumer devices estimate sleep from movement and heart rate, and validation work keeps finding they are weak at telling wake from sleep and weaker still at naming the stages. The number is an estimate wearing the clothes of a fact. Once it says poor, every ordinary dip in the day has a label waiting for it: the three o’clock slump, the word you cannot find, the short answer you gave your kid. Each of those gets filed as evidence, and the evidence was handed to you at six in the morning by a watch. |
| Those 32 people never stood a chance that day. Neither did you, I’d bet, on the morning the ring said 58. |
| That’s the part no one says out loud… |
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| Try this today |
| Tomorrow morning, give yourself a number before the device gives you one. Stay in bed a few seconds after you wake, rate how rested you feel from one to five, and say it out loud or write it on a pad by the bed. Look at the score afterward if you want it. Keep both numbers for one week, your five and the app’s, and see how often the two even agree. |
| The first number of your day may as well be yours. |
| Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick. |
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| This may work for one reason, and it is not positive thinking. Whichever report lands first appears to set the frame for everything the day brings, so putting your own read in front of the app’s gives the morning something of your own to stand on. |
| One caution, because it matters more than the hack does. If the tiredness is there every day for weeks, take it to a doctor rather than to the app. A tracker cannot see breathing at night or restless legs, and in the cases those sleep doctors wrote up, that was the kind of thing being missed. |
| Those three patients were not careless people, and neither are you. There’s still time for you, and tomorrow it costs about five seconds. |
| If nobody has told you this yet… |
| It was never your fault. |
| — Cole |
| P.S. What did your tracker give you last night? Just the number, hit reply. I’ll tell you tomorrow where most of the answers landed. |
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