Sleep on it pon

Everyone wants a good night's rest-but the more you obsess over it, the more elusive it becomes. Anita Chaudhuri enters the nightmarish, data-driven world of orthosomnia

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THE OTHER DAY, I was plodding away on the treadmill at the gym when I overheard two blokes chatting.

"I had a great night last night," said one.

My ears pricked up. A juicy story? "Scored 96." I yawned.

"That's insane," his companion gasped. "My average is 67 and I can't seem to get it much higher."

"Ah, but how's your HRV?"

"Never check that, but I know my REM score's been all over the place this week." It was only the mention of REM, AKA rapid eye movement, that made me realise they were comparing notes on their sleep performance.

Welcome to the world of orthosomnia, the medical term for an unhealthy obsession with attaining perfect sleep, usually driven by a wearable device. The term was coined by US researchers in a study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, which showed that, ironically, geeking out over your nightly sleep data may actually make your insomnia worse. The scientists observed how some people spent excessive time in bed trying to perfect their score, while others experienced anxiety about not achieving a good enough sleep performance.

But what constitutes "a great sleep score"? And is it even possible to hack an involuntary biological process? Katie Fischer, a behavioural sleep therapist, says that many of her clients are chasing the "perfect" night's sleep. "The thing is, if you ask good sleepers what they do, they will usually say 'nothing"," she says.

"They're not thinking about sleep. They're tired, go to bed and drift off.

They wake up feeling refreshed and don't worry about the occasional bad night because they know that happens sometimes. Meanwhile, people who come to me with problems are often putting pressure on themselves to attain a magic number of sleep hours, typically eight, without understanding that they might not need that much."