It is 3:07 a.m. The house is quiet. My thoughts are not. I have tried white noise. I have tried weighted blankets, melatonin, and cognitive behavioral therapy. I have set up elaborate routines, dimmed lights early, and put my phone across the room. I have tracked, analyzed, and obsessively reviewed every pattern of my sleep behavior. Still, I often get no more than three to five hours of sleep each day, and those hours rarely come consecutively. For someone with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and major depressive disorder (MDD), the elusive promise of a full night’s rest is more than a health goal—it is a desperate pursuit for survival. But what if this relentless chase for perfect sleep is not helping at all? What if it is making things worse?

In the digital age, the sleep industry has transformed into a high-tech marketplace filled with promises: optimize your rest, extend your REM cycles, and reclaim your mornings. Yet beneath these sleek apps and sleek sleep rings lies a troubling paradox. As discussed in a recent Salon article by Rae Hodge (2025), a growing number of people are not sleeping better because of technology—they are sleeping worse. They are developing a condition known as orthosomnia, a sleep disorder driven by anxiety about achieving ideal sleep patterns, often triggered or exacerbated by sleep tracking devices (Baron et al., 2017). For individuals already struggling with mental health challenges, this form of data-induced sleep anxiety is not just counterproductive—it is dangerous.

My personal journey with sleeplessness is not unusual. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one in three American adults does not get enough sleep on a regular basis (CDC, 2022). For individuals with mental health disorders, the statistics are even more grim. Roughly 70–90% of people with depression experience some form of sleep disturbance (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). The connection between sleep and mental health is bidirectional: poor sleep worsens mental health symptoms, and worsening mental health contributes to poor sleep. For those with PTSD, sleep can be a battleground of its own, where nightmares and hypervigilance rob the body of its most basic biological reprieve (Germain, 2013).

In recent years, the solution seemed to lie in data. Sleep trackers, wearable devices, smart mattresses, and mobile apps now promise to map every toss and turn, providing users with a “sleep score” and personalized tips for improvement. At first glance, these technologies appear empowering. They allow users to monitor trends, understand circadian rhythms, and supposedly take control of their sleep health. For someone like me—diagnosed, exhausted, and desperate—these tools held the promise of peace. I believed I could conquer my insomnia by outsmarting it.

But like many others, I began spiraling into an obsessive cycle. I found myself waking up more anxious about whether I had gotten enough REM sleep than about anything that had happened during the night itself. If my sleep tracker gave me a low score, my mood for the entire day shifted. On days when I felt well-rested but my app told me I had not slept deeply enough, I would question my perception. It was no longer my body or mind that dictated how I felt. It was my device.

The phenomenon of orthosomnia, first identified by Baron and colleagues (2017), captures this precise dilemma. It refers to a condition in which people experience insomnia or other sleep problems due to their reliance on and anxiety over sleep tracking technologies. Essentially, people are becoming so obsessed with perfect sleep that they sabotage their ability to actually sleep. The harder they try to “achieve” good rest, the more unattainable it becomes.

This obsession is not occurring in a vacuum. The rise of orthosomnia coincides with a broader cultural shift toward health optimization. We live in a world that promotes biohacking, gamification, and datafication of every bodily function. Steps are counted. Calories are measured. Heart rates are graphed. Sleep is scored. The problem is not the data itself—it is how that data is interpreted and internalized, especially by people whose mental health is already fragile.

The issue becomes even more critical when viewed through the lens of PTSD and GAD. Hypervigilance, a core symptom of PTSD, involves a constant state of alertness and exaggerated threat perception (APA, 2022). In my case, even a slight creak in the floor or the humming of an appliance can jolt me out of the brief serenity of sleep. Introducing sleep tracking into this equation did not soothe my vigilance—it intensified it. I was no longer only concerned with external dangers; now I was hyperaware of my own body’s movements, breathing rate, and wake time. The more metrics I monitored, the more I felt like I was failing. Each night became a test I could not pass, and the anxiety that followed was paralyzing.

Generalized anxiety disorder adds a second layer of turmoil. For those of us with GAD, worrying is not an activity—it is a state of being. Sleep tracking offered yet another thing to worry about. Was I falling asleep too slowly? Was I waking up too much? Was my deep sleep phase too short? Instead of detaching from the day, I carried these questions into bed like emotional baggage. I began doomscrolling sleep forums and obsessively researching why my numbers were not improving. In a cruel twist, the tools that were supposed to help me sleep were reinforcing the very cognitive patterns that kept me awake.

Depression completes the trifecta. Unlike anxiety, which keeps the mind racing, depression can make sleep feel futile. The nights when I slept for five or six hours straight, I sometimes awoke with a sense of dread rather than relief. Sleep, after all, requires the will to surrender. Depression erodes that will. The result is a cycle of fatigue that sleep apps cannot fix—because it is not just about sleep. It is about surviving the night without giving up.

What becomes evident is that for people with mental illness, especially multiple comorbid conditions, sleep is not simply a physiological process. It is an emotional, cognitive, and spiritual struggle. And the commodification of sleep through digital metrics turns that struggle into a scoreboard—one we rarely win.

To be clear, sleep tracking can be helpful for some people. When used sparingly and interpreted with caution, these devices can identify harmful patterns and prompt healthier habits. But the key phrase here is used sparingly. The problem is that in a culture addicted to optimization, moderation is rarely the norm. Instead, sleep tracking becomes compulsive, and the user becomes psychologically tethered to the performance of their rest. For those of us with existing psychological vulnerabilities, this creates a feedback loop of failure.

Experts are beginning to warn against overreliance on sleep trackers. Dr. Kelly Baron, one of the lead researchers on orthosomnia, emphasizes that “these devices can provide helpful data, but people need to remember that they are not medical instruments, and their interpretation can cause more anxiety than benefit in some cases” (Baron et al., 2017). Sleep medicine specialist Dr. Rafael Pelayo similarly cautions that the pressure to achieve “perfect” sleep can override the body’s natural rhythms, leading to insomnia rather than treating it (Pelayo, 2023).

So what can people like me do?

First, we must reclaim agency over our rest. That means putting away the devices—literally and figuratively. While technology may offer insight, it should not govern how we feel about our sleep or ourselves. Mental health-informed sleep hygiene must move beyond blue light filters and bedtime playlists. It should include trauma-informed therapy, mindfulness practices, and a compassionate acknowledgment that some nights will simply be hard.

Second, we must dismantle the myth that sleep is a problem we can solve with willpower or gadgets. Sleep is not a project. It is a necessity. And for people with PTSD, GAD, or depression, it must be approached with flexibility and grace, not punishment or performance anxiety.

Third, society must confront its glorification of productivity, which fuels sleep shame. When sleep is sacrificed in the name of hustle, those of us who struggle are made to feel weak or lazy. We are not. We are doing the hard work of healing, and that process is rarely linear—or restful.

Finally, we need more inclusive research and public health messaging that considers how sleep, mental health, and trauma interact. The conversation cannot remain rooted in apps and averages. It must center lived experience.

It is now 4:21 a.m. I am still awake. But I am breathing. I am not checking an app to validate whether my rest counts. I know it does—because I do.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). American Psychiatric Publishing.

Baron, K. G., Abbott, S., Jao, N., Manalo, N., & Mullen, R. (2017). Orthosomnia: Are some patients taking the quantified self too far? Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 13(2), 351–354. https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.6472

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022). 1 in 3 adults don’t get enough sleep. https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/data_statistics.html

Germain, A. (2013). Sleep disturbances as the hallmark of PTSD: Where are we now? American Journal of Psychiatry, 170(4), 372–382. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12040432

Hodge, R. (2025, May 2). Obsessed with getting good sleep? It could be making it worse. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2025/05/02/obsessed-with-getting-good-sleep-it-could-be-making-it-worse/

Pelayo, R. (2023). How anxiety about sleep keeps you awake. Stanford Sleep Medicine Lectures.