Is Your Tracker Telling You How to Feel?
You wake up, check your sleep score and see:
Great sleep! 🎉
Except... you feel exhausted.
Or maybe you wake up feeling surprisingly refreshed. Then you check your tracker.
Poor sleep. 😳
Suddenly you're wondering...
Wait. Am I tired? Should I feel worse than I do?
Here's a question worth asking:
Were you tired before you saw the score?
And there's another question worth considering, especially for those of us who want to honor God with our health:
Has the data become more influential than it should be?
A tracker can be a wonderful tool. But if a number on our wrist starts determining our mood, our choices, or how we believe we're supposed to feel, it's worth noticing.
This isn't about guilt or giving up your tracker. It's simply about awareness.
Our health is worth stewarding, but the tools we use to steward it shouldn't become the thing we serve.
Your tracker is giving you information, not the whole story
Sleep trackers can be useful tools. Depending on the device, they may use movement, heart rate, heart rate variability and other signals to estimate what's happening while you sleep.
But they're doing just that: estimating.
When it comes to sleep tracker accuracy, consumer wearables don't measure sleep the same way a clinical sleep study does. Research has found differences between wearable data and polysomnography, the clinical gold standard for measuring sleep.
That doesn't mean you should throw your tracker in a drawer. 😂
It means your sleep score is one piece of information.
And so is how you actually feel.
Can your sleep score influence how you feel?
Here's where it gets really interesting.
You've probably heard of the placebo effect. There's also something called the nocebo effect, where negative expectations can influence the symptoms or experiences we perceive.
And researchers have found something fascinating when it comes to sleep.
In one study, people were told they'd gotten either above-average or below-average REM sleep, regardless of how they'd actually slept. What they believed about their sleep affected their performance on some cognitive tests.
Think about that for a minute.
You wake up feeling pretty good.
Then your tracker tells you:
Poor sleep. Low recovery.
Now you're noticing every yawn.
Maybe I shouldn't work out today.
No wonder I can't concentrate.
I'm going to be exhausted by this afternoon.
But...
Were you feeling that way before you looked?
When tracking your sleep starts interfering with your sleep
There's even a term researchers have used for becoming overly focused on achieving perfect sleep data:
Orthosomnia.
Sleep clinicians coined the term after noticing people becoming preoccupied with improving the numbers produced by their sleep trackers.
Ironically, stressing about getting the perfect sleep score isn't exactly conducive to a restful night's sleep. 😂
Orthosomnia isn't a formal medical diagnosis, but it highlights something important:
More data isn't always more helpful.
Especially when we start trusting a number more than our own body.
Try this tomorrow morning
Before you look at your tracker, check in with you.
Ask yourself:
How do I feel?
Do I feel rested?
How's my energy and mental clarity?
Then look at your tracker.
Do they match?
Maybe they do. Maybe they don't.
Either way, you've gathered useful information.
One weird night or a pattern?
One strange sleep score?
Don't obsess over it.
But if you're seeing the same thing night after night, get curious about the pattern.
Maybe your tracker consistently shows poor sleep.
Don't blame the tracker just yet. 😂
Maybe every night you have a couple glasses of wine, your sleep score tanks. Or perhaps you notice it after eating late, staying up scrolling or having an especially stressful day.
Now your tracker is giving you useful information.
Or maybe your tracker says you're sleeping beautifully night after night...
but you're still exhausted.
That's information too.
Rather than dismissing how you feel because your tracker says you're sleeping well, it may be time to ask a different question:
What might be contributing to how I feel?
Your sleep is only one piece of a much bigger picture. Nutrition, blood sugar balance, stress, hormones, movement, digestion and other factors can all play a role in your energy and how you feel.
That's when we stop chasing a score and start connecting the dots.
Look for patterns, not perfection
This is where I think trackers can be incredibly useful.
Use them to notice trends.
What happens when you drink alcohol? Eat later? Exercise? Have a stressful day? Go to bed earlier?
And then compare that information with the most important data point:
How do you actually feel?
So tomorrow morning, try something different:
Check in before you check your tracker.
Your body has been giving you information long before there was an app for that.
It might be worth listening to it first.
To your empowered health,
Sheri
Sheri Johnson is a Functional Nutrition & Lifestyle Practitioner and founder of Empowered Health Coaching. She helps women uncover what may be driving concerns like low energy, hormone changes, inflammation, digestive issues, stubborn weight and poor sleep by looking at the whole person and addressing potential root causes.
Her personalized approach incorporates nutrition, lifestyle, functional blood chemistry and testing when appropriate to help clients understand their bodies and make sustainable changes that support long-term health and vitality.
Ready to discover what may be standing in the way of feeling your best? Schedule a complimentary 30-minute Empowered Health Strategy Call.
Sources & Further Reading
Performance of Consumer Wrist-Worn Sleep Tracking Devices Compared to Polysomnography: A Meta-Analysis — Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2025. PubMed
Placebo Sleep Affects Cognitive Functioning — Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2014. PubMed
Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self Too Far? — Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2017. Full article
Sleep Disorders and Complementary Health Approaches — National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. NCCIH
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