SEATTLE – Sleep-tracking apps may add to insomnia, studies show.
Tracking sleep doesn’t always give insight into your sleep quality, and in many cases, it does quite the opposite, according to Dr. Vishesh Kapur, co-director of the UW Medicine Sleep Centre.
“There’s a tendency for folks who have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep to try too hard and to focus too much on sleep,” Kapur said in University of Washington video. “So, even though the person may not feel bad because of their sleep, they say, 'Well my app is telling me I’m not sleeping deeply enough or I’m not doing this,' and that can create anxiety that really doesn’t have to be there.”
Most sleeping apps haven’t been clinically validated or directly compared to a full sleep study.
“[But] when they have been evaluated, the ones that just reside on the cell phones typically don’t seem to correlate very well with what’s going on with other measures used in clinical practice,” Kapur said.
Kapur says that people who have troubling falling asleep may not be getting enough time in bed or there could be a host of other problems, including sleeping habits or medical conditions.
“it’s not a very simple approach to address some of these problems because everyone’s a little different and a lot of these apps assume they’re dealing with someone who is a prototypical person whatever,” he said.
“My big take home here is that you should trust yourself,” Kapur added. “You should pay attention to how you feel in the morning and how you do during the day and how you felt your sleep was – and that has more validity than a technological device and what it’s telling you.”
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