Hi Reader,
Kristen's eyes open before her alarm most mornings, and the first thing she does, before she stretches, before she prays, before her feet even hit the floor, is reach for her phone to check her sleep score.
72. Not the 85 she got Tuesday.
She told me she felt disappointed, right there in bed, before the day had even started. "I know it's just a number," she said. "But it ruins my morning every single time."
Kristen has an autoimmune condition that already makes rest complicated. Flares that steal a night's sleep, a nervous system that's been on high alert for years. So when a friend recommended a ring that tracks everything, including deep sleep, REM, heart rate variability, "readiness", she thought it might finally help her understand her body.
Instead, she told me, she now lies awake doing math. If it's 1am and she hasn't fallen asleep, she calculates exactly how many hours of "good data" she has left before the app will call her night a failure.
If you've ever felt a spike of dread checking a sleep score, a step count, a glucose graph, or any of the numbers meant to help you heal, that reaction is real and legitimate. You're not being dramatic, and you're not bad at this.
The Science
In 2017, researchers at Rush University Medical Center, led by Dr. Kelly Baron, published a case series in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine describing patients whose sleep got worse specifically because of their trackers. They coined a term for it: orthosomnia, an unhealthy preoccupation with achieving "perfect" sleep data, similar to the way orthorexia describes an unhealthy obsession with eating perfectly.
One case that stayed with me: a 39-year-old man developed real anxiety trying to hit exactly eight hours every night, checking his device obsessively, which made falling asleep even harder. Another patient trusted her tracker's numbers over an actual clinical sleep study, even when the real data showed she was getting plenty of deep sleep. The researchers were blunt about something: these devices simply aren't validated to accurately measure what stage of sleep you're in. You may be trusting a number that was never as precise as it looked.
In my experience, this pattern shows up often in people who've already been burned by four protocols and a hundred conflicting opinions. You've learned to distrust your body and outsource the verdict to something external. So of course, the ring, the app, the score becomes the next authority you hand yourself over to.
It's not that you don't know how to rest. It's that resting has turned into one more performance to optimize, and your nervous system knows the difference between actual rest and rest under surveillance. Checking a glowing screen the second you wake, doing anxious math about your numbers at 1am is not winding down. At a cellular level, that's you asking your body to stay alert, precisely in the hours it's supposed to be letting go.
The Scripture
Almost two thousand years before anyone tracked heart rate variability in their sleep, Jesus asked His disciples a question that hits differently once you've lain awake doing sleep-score math:
"And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?" (Matthew 6:27, ESV)
He wasn't saying your sleep doesn't matter. He was naming something the research confirms, that anxious vigilance doesn't actually buy you anything. Not one more hour, not one better number. It just costs you the rest you were reaching for in the first place.
Your symptoms are data, and so is your dread every morning at 6am. It's not proof you're broken or that you'll never sleep well again. It's information that the tool meant to help you heal may currently be doing the opposite.
The Steps
Here's what I'd like to offer, not as a rule, just as an experiment: for one week, don't look at your sleep score until midday, after your body has already told you, through how you actually feel, how the night went. Let your own body report first, and let the device confirm or contradict it second, if at all.
And when you catch yourself doing the 1am math, try asking God the honest version of that question instead of solving it yourself: "I can't add an hour to this night by worrying about it. Help me let go of the number and just rest in You."
Healing is possible, even with a complicated relationship to sleep, and even if you're not ready to take the ring off yet.
If this sounds like your mornings and if you're more exhausted by your tracker than by your actual sleep, let's talk about what's actually keeping you up. Not the app's version. Yours.
[Book a free Balance Blueprint call here] and let's get curious together about what your body's really telling you, tracker aside.
With you,
Andrea DuMez, RN, CHN, NBC-HWC
Registered Nurse | Holistic Nutritionist | Integrative Health Coach | Certified Metabolic Balance Coach
P.S. Kristen put her ring in a drawer for two weeks, just to see. The first few nights, she told me, she felt strangely anxious not knowing her "numbers." By night five, she said something I loved: "I just knew I slept okay. I could feel it." If you want help learning to trust that feeling again, I'd love to help you find your way back to it.
