The modern Indian goes to bed carrying enough equipment to establish a small diagnostic centre. There is a watch to measure sleep, a ring to verify the watch, an app to interpret the ring and a podcast explaining why none of this is enough. By morning, the man has slept seven hours and received 61 marks. His wife says he was snoring. He says the data suggests otherwise. Marriage has survived many things. Now it must survive an appeal against eyewitness evidence.
We used to lose sleep over homework. Now sleep is the homework. We have brought the office into the bedroom, appointed ourselves supervisor and asked an unconscious employee to improve his performance. Even the pillow has deliverables.
Behind the comedy sits a frightened person. Someone with an early meeting, ageing parents, a child’s school fees and the conviction that tomorrow requires a better version of himself. He cannot control the company, the traffic or his father’s scan report. Surely he can control bedtime. The sleep routine becomes one small territory where life might finally obey instructions. Then sleep refuses, and he feels he has failed at doing nothing.
In 2017, researchers described three patients whose fixation on tracker readings complicated their sleep treatment. They called the phenomenon “orthosomnia”: the pursuit of correct or perfect sleep. A small case series cannot establish how common this is. But it captured a peculiar development: people seeking help partly because their devices had persuaded them something was wrong. We once asked, “How did you sleep?” Now we ask the wrist.
An unsettling experiment lies beneath this joke. In two studies involving 164 participants, researchers gave people fabricated feedback suggesting their previous night’s sleep had been above or below average. That assigned verdict predicted performance on some subsequent thinking tasks, though not all. This does not mean genuine sleep deprivation is imaginary or that confidence replaces sleep. It suggests the story we tell ourselves about the night can shape the day. A bad score may arrive with its own luggage.
Tracking can help reveal patterns. The trouble begins when an estimate becomes a judgement. Most consumer trackers infer sleep from signals such as movement and heart rate; they do not measure brain activity like a laboratory sleep study. Their colourful charts deserve informed curiosity, not obedience. If you wake feeling refreshed but your watch gives you a poor sleep score, look at the pattern over several nights. One low score need not spoil a perfectly good morning.
Sleep itself runs on biology rather than ambition. Pressure to sleep builds during waking hours, partly involving adenosine; a separate circadian clock helps determine when sleep comes readily. Light influences that clock. Caffeine blocks adenosine’s effects. This explains why exhaustion and sleepiness are not always identical: you can feel thoroughly finished while your brain remains open for business. Even a small cup of tea contains caffeine. Adding ginger improves the flavour; it does not cancel the caffeine.
Then we make the understandable mistake of trying harder. We go to bed early, monitor every sensation and calculate tomorrow’s remaining brainpower at fifteen-minute intervals. The bed becomes associated with frustration and watchfulness. “Relax,” we command ourselves, with the tenderness of a traffic policeman. Even breathing becomes competitive: four counts in, six out, followed by a quick inspection to see whether serenity has arrived. Sleep is difficult to approach while checking whether it is approaching.
The practical response is pleasantly unmarketable. Keep a reasonably consistent waking time. Get daylight and movement during the day. Move caffeine earlier if sleep is troublesome. Allow sufficient opportunity for sleep, but go to bed when sleepy. If you remain awake and increasingly frustrated, leave the bed for a quiet activity in dim light and return when drowsy. Turn the clock away. If tracking makes you anxious, take a break. None of this requires a subscription or a Himalayan mineral.
Persistent insomnia, however, deserves more than household wisdom. Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I, is recommended as the first treatment for chronic insomnia; sleep hygiene alone is often insufficient. Loud snoring with breathing pauses or severe daytime sleepiness also needs assessment. As a physician, I would rather understand the problem than hand someone twelve more rules to fail. And we must make room for realities a routine cannot fix: shift work, caregiving, pain, an employer who thinks midnight is a leadership opportunity.
Protect your sleep. Get help when it remains difficult. But leave some space between caring for yourself and surveilling yourself. Tonight, you need not become calmer, sharper or more successful before earning the right to rest. Put tomorrow’s unfinished business down beside the phone. Let the watch manage without you. You have spent the whole day being answerable to someone. The pillow need not become another person you must impress.
