Do you check your sleep score every morning and cheer or despair based upon the outcome? If sleep tracking is an integral aspect of your self-care ritual, what happens when you take a break for a few weeks? If you’ve never done so, I would encourage a lengthy wearable vacation and a little time getting tuned in to how you actually feel, separate from what your sleep metrics are suggesting.

Here’s why: It is very possible to become conditioned by data in a way that perpetuates dysregulated sleep. In fact, we have a name for it—orthosomnia. In essence, living up to the expectation of your sleep data, whether good or bad, alters behavior and energy levels. It is the nocebo effect in full force: the data says you had a bad night of sleep, so you drag yourself through the day accordingly.

Now, you might have been dragging anyway, but the quantification of a poor night’s sleep can exacerbate the circumstances, clouding one’s ability to accept what is, as it is. Sleep trackers are useful for observing patterns, such as whether alcohol worsens sleep quality—spoiler alert: it does—but if you’re tuned in to what your body is communicating, you can often get the same feedback our species has relied upon for millennia.

Image by ChatGPT, OpenAI

Become more inwardly attuned and trust how you feel. It also helps to do the opposite of hexing yourself with the nocebo effect and practice positive affirmation instead. It’s all too common to have the thought, “I didn’t get enough done,” at the end of the day and to wake up thinking, “I didn’t get enough sleep.” (Hat tip to Tony Robbins for that observation.) That’s no way to bookend your day. You’d be much better served reflecting, “I did my best today,” before bed and rising with the energy of, “No matter how much sleep I got, I’m going to have a great day.”

With that philosophical primer in place, consider the following practical advice. Sleep hygiene is the term used for healthy habits around bedtime and the environmental conditions of one’s bedroom. The latter includes sleeping in a cool, dark room without operational electronic devices.

I want to double down on this last point because sleeping with an operational cellphone within reach—or even worse, underneath one’s pillow—is disastrous for sleep. Moreover, the evidence suggests that exposure to electromagnetic fields are a potent human carcinogen, and we still don’t fully understand when long-term exposure becomes detrimental. But to state that there is no harmful biological effect from cellphone radiation is patently false.

Healthy bedtime habits include no caffeine past noon, avoiding alcohol in the evening, and being done with work and stimulating activities for the hour or two before bed. Dim, amber-colored lights also help with winding down, and getting morning and midday outdoor sun is the best path to favorably resetting one’s circadian rhythm.

Another overlooked aspect is balanced blood sugar and the impact of stress on a healthy sleep cycle. To read more about that, check out my post, “Why Do I Always Wake Around 3am?,” in this blog.

When the stars align, long, quality sleep is a panacea of medicine. Healing happens in earnest during the cycles of deep sleep, while dreaming relaxes the psyche and helps with memory consolidation. Dreams are also an important window into the subconscious, with morning journaling being a rich source of insight.

What’s most important is rhythm and constancy. Going to bed and waking at roughly the same time each day may sound painfully boring, but boring is often where the medicine lives. The body loves a groove. It wants dependable cues: darkness, warmth, quiet, safety, repetition. Not perfection, mind you. Perfection is just another metric wearing a fake mustache.

So please sleep. Protect it. Make it sacred without making it neurotic. Let the tracker go long enough to remember that your body is not a spreadsheet, your dreams are not data points, and a life well-rested is not measured by a ring, watch, or app. It is felt in the marrow, in the mood, in the morning light, and in the quiet confidence that you are allowed to begin again—whether you slept eight hours or five and change.