The dark side of sleep scores and step counts

In late 2022 I lost my Oura Ring- and I’m glad that I did.

That Oura Ring was a godsend during my first few months owning it.

I used data from the ring to figure out the main drivers of my sleep problems. I went from struggling to sleep 6 hours a night to averaging nearly 8. I went from sleep scores consistently in the 60’s to sleep scores in the 80’s and 90’s.

But eventually, I became a slave to those scores.

I remember a morning when I noticed my score drop down into the 70’s. I hyper-focused on sleeping well that night, to the point that it took me 3 hours to fall asleep. I woke up the next morning and immediately checked my phone: Your sleep score: 48.

I decided in that moment that I was in for a rough day. I threw out all my plans involving hard exercise and deep thinking.

I had officially developed a habit of using my sleep score to dictate how I felt, rather than just checking in with my body.

As wearable usage grows, more & more people are falling victim to this cycle:

• Orthosomnia is a relatively new term, now used to describe “the obsessive pursuit of optimal sleep, fueled by sleep trackers and apps”, which ironically often results in worse sleep.

• You’re probably familiar with the placebo effect (people experiencing positive effects from a fake treatment, because they simply expect it to help), but now its evil twin, the nocebo effect, is surging.

  • The nocebo effect describes what’s happening when someone has, in reality, slept wonderfully, but sees a low sleep score and then begins to experience symptoms of a person who has slept terribly

  • It also describes what’s happening when someone is, in reality, ready to tackle a workout, but their smartwatch tells them they need to recover, and then they experience symptoms of fatigue

My girlfriend got me the book The Expectation Effect for my birthday (would highly recommend). The gist is that our beliefs & expectations of how a situation should make us feel can often lead to those exact feelings, whether or not the situation itself would have truly led us there.

You may have heard about the famous ‘ego-depletion theory’: the idea that willpower is a finite resource that we use up throughout the day.

Turns out, based on more recent research, that your willpower is only a finite resource if you believe your willpower is a finite resource!

The point here isn’t to shit on wearables- but to remind you to trust your intuition over numbers, and to not beat yourself up when things don’t go according to plan.

Most of my writing has, and will continue to be, about the different ways you can take better care of yourself as a sedentary worker- aiming for at least 6-8k steps per day, aiming for 7-9 hours of sleep, etc.

But life happens, and you won’t always hit those benchmarks. And that’s fine. Your expectations about the negative effects of getting a bad night of sleep, missing a step goal, or missing a workout matter arguably just as much as the action itself.

So, control what you can control; set yourself up for success most of the time, and if things go off the rails, just say to yourself, “We’ll get ‘em next time.”

-Nico

P.S: if you ever have feedback on these emails, positive or constructive, let me know! (I read every email)