Why Do I Sleep Poorly When My Watch Says I Slept Great?

A smartwatch helped Doris Christina Steiner turn good intentions into a daily exercise routine. Step targets and sports challenges made movement feel like a game, and eventually it became second nature.

Then her relationship with the device changed. “I increasingly felt like a living Tamagotchi,” Steiner said. The watch awarded points, tracked challenges and reminded her to reach her goals. What had started as motivation became a standard she felt compelled to meet. When the watch was charging, she sometimes stopped moving because the activity would not be recorded.

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I increasingly felt like a living Tamagotchi.

Steiner later noticed the same conflict in her sleep data. She often received poor sleep scores despite feeling rested. At some point, she began asking herself why she trusted the numbers more than her own experience.

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Because the watch did not record it, it did not count.

The question is being examined in international studies. Modern smartwatches record steps, heart rate, sleep duration, REM and deep-sleep phases, and heart-rate variability. They turn those signals into scores, charts and recommendations. But sleep is a complex biological process shaped by stress, daily life, mood, illness, alcohol, exercise and other factors. A watch can capture only selected signals and convert them into estimates.

Sleep researchers have given a name to an excessive preoccupation with using sleep data to achieve perfect sleep: orthosomnia. Researcher Kelly Glazer Baron coined the term in a 2017 contribution to the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, which examined patients seeking help because of their wearable data. A 2024 study in Bahrain involving 523 people examined how widespread the phenomenon was in the general population.

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I often had poor scores while I myself felt rested. At some point I asked myself why I listened to numbers more than to my own feelings.