An article in The Guardian this week discussed the rise of Orthosomnia, an obsession with getting optimal sleep using sleep tracking data. The article estimated that the sleep tracker industry has an estimated worth of £270m and this is set to double!
Is it a help or a hindrance?
The main issue with focusing all our attention in one area is it can create problems where there weren’t any. When working with clients with school aged children, we routinely advise their parents to stop all sleep related conversations as it creates unnecessary pressure for the child who then becomes anxious about trying to fall asleep. The same theory applies to adults, if you expend all your energy focusing on trying to beat your sleep score, guess what’s not going to happen?!
Another issue is the data summary is presented to you after the event so there is nothing you can do to change it. Waking each morning to be told you will be tired or are in a sleep deficit because you didn’t reach your target the previous night presents an ominous day’s forecast and won’t do much to lift your overall mood.
Sleep tracking tech is hugely popular with parents who download apps and keep months of records trying to look for patterns as to why their child is waking. In nearly all cases we have seen, often the only pattern is its frequency over a sustained period. A family I recently worked with told me how long their baby had taken to fall asleep one night. This hadn’t been the usual pattern whilst we’d been working together and in picking things apart, they told me they had put their baby to bed at 6pm. I questioned why it was so early and discovered the app had told them to! I can confirm that following this conversation and a consultation with us, not only is their baby now sleeping soundly each night, the app has been deleted!
How we work with you
Before starting a consultation, we do ask families to keep a feeds and sleep diary. This will show us frequency of wakings so we can see how engrained the sleep association is and whether the child’s body clock is being affected by repeated nocturnal visits to the milk bar or their mid morning snooze was due to them wanting to watch tv from 5am! But there would be no advantage to tracking this information on an app over scribbling it down on old receipt found in a kitchen drawer. We know that parents frantically google what the optimum amount of sleep their baby needs is and as with adults, the most reliable indicator of this is our overall mood and behaviour. So if you’re feeling a little strung out and snappy or are fantasising over having a cat nap in the office loo at 11am, chances are you are tired!
So what can be done or are we all destined to be eternally knackered?!
Absolutely not! For children, this means regular mealtimes and nap times, a familiar and calming bedtime routine and no whizz pop content on screens for an hour before bedtime. For adults, it is largely the same but without the luxury of a midday nap. It really isn’t rocket science working out that if you tank up on caffeine throughout the day and have too much Chablis in the evenings, it will affect your quality of sleep! Good sleep hygiene is so important for us all and learning to sleep well when you are young sets your children up for life and importantly, to be the very best versions of themselves each day. You don’t need tech to tell you that.
If you would like to have a chat with us about how we can potentially help you and your family, do drop us a line here.
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