The essence of tracking your sleep is to help you find out if you’re getting a good night rest or not, but studies shows that it can increase your problems in some cases. Scientists talking with The New York Times warned against it, stating that sleep tracker apps and devices can worsen insomnia both through giving inaccurate data and making one’s anxieties worse.
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In a recent study, sleep tracking result led to a lot of people spending too much time in bed that they shouldn’t have — just to boost their sleep statistics. It also reported non-existent conditions in people that led to huge effort being made to treat what is never there.
Now, this is not to say the machine is completely unreliable. Not too long, manufacturers have made efforts to defend their products. Fitbit’s Dr. Conor Heneghan said, ”that few users deal with serious sleep anxiety, and that the tracking data could stress the effects of consistent sleep schedules and harmful habits. They can also pinpoint heart rates and movement associated with different sleep stages.”
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That said, sleep tracking machine can never be as accurate as humans would be. Fitbit’s own study showed matches between its trackers and medical equipment just 70 percent of the time versus 90 percent for humans. And without regulation or standards, the results one gets from these machines varies from one device to another.
Though the result you will get maybe useful in some way, it could be more helpful to avoid tracking sleep at all. You could save yourself more trouble by not tracking than you would when you eventually track.
