Why sleep apps could be keeping you awake

Wearable technology means we can now fixate on our nighttime data, but this insight could be doing us more harm than good

- BY DR RAJ PERSAUD, CONSULTANT PSYCHIATRIST

Thanks to the growing popularity of wearable tech and apps, many of us won't answer the question: “Have you had a good sleep?” before checking our data.

But could this actually be affecting our ability to get a decent rest? From a psychological and scientific perspective, it’s entirely possible that this focus on quality sleep could be leading people down a slippery slope to insomnia and sleep deprivation.

Sleep specialists are becoming increasingly concerned that “wearables”, like smartwatches, provide a lot of information about nocturnal activities, but little solid advice on how to interpret data.

This can leave us obsessing about a natural process which, if left alone, has an automatic self-correcting mechanism: too little sleep on one night leads to more the next. Before all this tech came along, most of us didn't bother fixating on what happened during the previous night - we simply got on with the day.