By Amir Moghaddam and Andy Munoz
Wearables are a revolutionary way to monitor your health, but they may also ruin your day. We’ve all heard this - someone feels like they slept great, only to wake up and see that their wrist band rated their sleep poorly. The rest of their day is spent feeling tired; alas, the connected app told them they should.
This is the digital nocebo effect – the opposite of the placebo effect. If you’re told you should feel worse, you often do. The wearable may influence perception, not just report it.
Are we chasing better sleep or just a better score? Is the goal of trying habits to improve your sleep to feel better when you wake up in the morning and with fewer interruptions? Or is it to have a machine tell you that your sleep score is through the roof?
Then there’s the physical health aspect: Is it safe to have a Bluetooth/Wi-Fi device constantly strapped to your body? Is it safe for anything to be constantly strapped to your body for that matter? Wearable rash is becoming a trend - a quick Reddit search will show you the dark side.
The fix: Subjective tracking. In clinical trials, questionnaires play a foundational part in determining efficacy of a drug. In pain medication trials, volunteers who exhibit pain try the experimental medicine and report the results using a survey. The job of the medicine is to make the volunteer experience less pain, subjectively. The experience of improvement is the actual endpoint.
What should we be doing to help our sleep? Writing in a notepad what you’re doing and how you’re sleeping could reveal powerful insights. It’s one thing to experiment and remember how they helped you, but recording them is the key to compare side by side what is helping or hurting. What makes it even easier? An app that keeps all that data for you and enables you to cleanly compare with analytics. And the most meta? An AI that does that all for you and compares your data against a community of people just like you with similar demographics.
Because we believe in this so strongly, we felt obligated to create the OptySleep app - a new, holistic way to track and optimize your sleep. It’s gaining traction; the user base is increasing rapidly.
It flips the script: instead of measuring your body, it measures your experience, then helps you improve it. As more people recognize the pitfalls of the Sleep Wearable Paradox, this approach is resonating. Not everyone wants a device strapped to their arm or finger. Many simply want to sleep better - and trust how they feel when they wake up.
If the future of sleep is healthier, calmer, and more personalized, it might not sit on your wrist. It might simply start with paying attention to how you feel.
This article reflects the authors’ opinions and publicly reported user experiences. It does not provide medical advice and is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition.
About the authors:
Amir & Andy are a clinical trials professional and a tech design director, respectively. They built the company Opty to put health optimization in the hands of the user. Their first app, OptySleep offers a platform for people to run nightly sleep “trials”, track results, and unlock AI insights that reveal which habits really work for them. It is currently available in the iOS App Store.
Get sleep insights without the weight of wearables. Download OptySleep for iOS.