1 in 3 Sleep Tracker Users Have Sleep Anxiety - Here's Why (And How to Fix It)

You did everything right last night. Wound down early, dimmed the lights, even skipped the second coffee after lunch. Then you open your sleep app in the morning and there it is: a big, unforgiving 61. Sixty-one?! Suddenly you're doing mental math on where it all went wrong, and that groggy-but-fine feeling you woke up with turns into low-key panic. The old advice for a restless night used to be counting sheep.

These days we've traded the sheep for a spreadsheet, and it turns out staring at a number is a lot better at keeping you awake than any flock ever was.

There's actually a name for this: orthosomnia - an unhealthy obsession with getting a "perfect" sleep score. And it's a lot more common than most people think.

Myth: A Sleep Tracker Will Fix Your Sleep

Reality: for a growing number of people, it's doing the opposite.

A 2026 nationally representative survey of U.S. adults, published in the journal Sleep, found that roughly a third of Americans (32.4%) now track their sleep with a wearable or app. Of those trackers, almost a third scored positive for orthosomnia risk - meaning they regularly felt nervous, anxious, or on edge about their sleep data, or couldn't stop worrying about it.

That's a lot of people lying in bed, stressing about how well they're about to sleep, before they've even closed their eyes.

How A Good Habit Turns Into A Bad One

Here's the mechanism: trackers are supposed to help you understand your sleep. But somewhere along the way, for a lot of people, checking the data quietly replaces actually resting as the goal. You stop asking "do I feel okay?" and start asking "did I hit my number?"

And because stress and anxiety are two of the biggest things that disrupt sleep in the first place, worrying about your score can tank the very thing you're trying to improve. It's a feedback loop with no winners.

One person put it simply after ditching their sleep ring for good: they said they just didn't want to wake up and anxiously check their sleep score anymore. Which, honestly, is a pretty reasonable place to land.

What To Do Instead

You don't have to throw your tracker in a drawer forever (although, no judgment if you do). A few small shifts go a long way:

1. Build a phone-free, tracker-free wind-down. The last 20-30 minutes before bed shouldn't involve checking anything - no score, no notifications, no scrolling. Just you, actually winding down.
2. Go by how you feel, not by the score. If you woke up energized, believe your body over the app. A number on a screen can't tell you how you feel better than you can.
3. Save the tracker for occasional check-ins. Treat it like a monthly check-up, not a nightly report card. Glance at trends every few weeks instead of grading every single night.

The Takeaway

Sleep tracking isn't the villain here - obsessing over it is. The moment a good night's sleep becomes about hitting a number instead of actually resting, the tool has stopped helping and started getting in the way.

So tonight, put the score away, put the phone away, and trust that you don't need a percentage to know you slept well.