But, increasingly, I now see people whose biggest issue isn\u2019t a medical disorder \u2013 it\u2019s sleep fear.<\/p>\n
And by fear, I mean significant, sustained and debilitating dread about their sleep \u2013 the quality of it, as well as the impact they\u2019re convinced it\u2019s having on their \u00admental and physical health.<\/p>\n
These patients usually come in with reams of data and measurements from their sleep trackers, convinced the occasional \u2018bad night\u2019 has ruined their health.<\/p>\n
They don\u2019t just struggle with sleep, they panic they\u2019ll never be able to get their sleep \u2018right\u2019. In their mind, they are just one bad night away from a health crisis.<\/p>\n
They then develop elaborate routines of things they \u2018must\u2019 do before bed, pre-bed rituals that include everything from mouth taping (social media gurus claim this increases oxygen intake and improves sleep \u2013 it doesn\u2019t) to obsessive wind-down routines.<\/p>\n
In fact, they\u2019re only making their sleep worse \u2013 by treating it as something fragile and elusive, something that needs to be perfected, rather than a natural process.<\/p>\n
Indeed, I believe the more we\u2019ve been told to optimise and protect our sleep, the more we\u2019ve started to fear it. Suddenly, sleep has become a source of stress, something to calculate and control.<\/p>\n
![\"Increasingly,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/104950075-15406607-But_increasingly_I_now_see_people_whose_biggest_issue_isn_t_a_me-m-12_17664215058.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Increasingly, I now see people whose biggest issue isn\u2019t a medical disorder \u2013 it\u2019s sleep fear<\/p>\n
Of course, it\u2019s good that we\u2019re more aware of sleep\u2019s importance to our long-term health. Studies have shown chronic insomnia \u2013 defined as persistent difficulty in falling asleep, staying asleep or waking too early at least three times per week for three months or longer \u2013 combined with short sleep duration can raise blood pressure and increase heart rate.<\/p>\n
But some headlines appear to suggest that if you don\u2019t get at least six hours a night, it\u2019s a death sentence.<\/p>\n
Yet the scientific studies that drive this notion \u2013 and the sleep fear I see in my clinic \u2013 fail to distinguish between sleep duration and sleep quality.<\/p>\n
They group together people who sleep short amounts but who sleep well, with those who sleep short amounts and have fragmented, poor-quality sleep \u2013 and then attribute the health outcomes to sleep duration alone, rather than recognising it\u2019s poor quality or disrupted sleep that could be driving the risk.<\/p>\n
In a more accurate representation, a review of studies found that poor quality sleep amplifies the health risks of short sleep \u2013 it\u2019s not short sleep alone that\u2019s the problem, reported the journal Frontiers in Medicine in 2022.<\/p>\n
Critically, another review, in the journal Sleep in 2010, found that long sleep durations \u2013 commonly assumed to be healthier \u2013 were also linked to increased \u00admortality, particularly when sleep was fragmented.<\/p>\n
So both short and long sleep are linked to risks when sleep quality is poor \u2013 not because of the number of hours alone.<\/p>\n
Indeed, there is no single \u2018right\u2019 duration of sleep. For years, we were told we need eight hours. More recently, there\u2019s been a shift to seven hours as a new magic number.<\/p>\n
But large-scale studies show huge individual variability in sleep need \u2013 from around six to nine hours a night in healthy people (and it\u2019s vital here to note that no one will get this every night).<\/p>\n
![\"It](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/104950073-15406607-It_feels_empowering_to_quantify_the_mysterious_hours_you_spend_u-m-16_17664216792.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
It feels empowering to quantify the mysterious hours you spend unconscious. But there\u2019s evidence sleep trackers can do more harm than good<\/p>\n
This matters because forcing people to chase a specific number of hours can drive anxiety and worsen sleep, leading them to spend longer in bed, which leads to more broken sleep \u2013 the very thing that causes health risks in the first place.<\/p>\n
After my years of clinical practice and research at Harvard Medical School, as well as developing sleep programmes for NHS sleep centres, my first piece of advice for those who really want a good night\u2019s sleep is: stop worrying about it!<\/p>\n
Here I explain why, as well as offering other simple tips to improve your shut-eye\u2026<\/p>\n
Monitoring sleep will only make it worse<\/p>\n
So prevalent is sleep anxiety now that it\u2019s caused a new sleep disorder \u2013 insomnia caused by being anxious about achieving perfect sleep, or orthosomnia.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve seen this increasingly in my clinic and my observations are matched by research findings, such as a study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine in 2017, which found that participants who excessively monitored their sleep became more anxious and experienced poorer sleep, even though when their brain activity was monitored it showed their actual sleep patterns were normal.<\/p>\n
This is because the amygdala, a brain region involved in processing fear and anxiety, becomes more active in those who develop orthosomnia. The knock-on effect is that they\u2019re more susceptible to stress about their sleep \u2013 a vicious circle.<\/p>\n
Another fascinating study from the same journal in 2014 found that people with high levels of \u2018sleep reactivity\u2019 (i.e. how much stress about sleep impacts their lives) were more likely to develop chronic insomnia. Not because they were sleeping poorly, but because they worried about sleeping poorly.<\/p>\n
My patients describe how their sleep fear kicks in when they\u2019re lying in bed, all too aware that time is passing and they\u2019re still not asleep.<\/p>\n
![\"If](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/104950195-15406607-image-a-17_1766421714175.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve binged a Netflix series while lying still, your tracker might credit you with an hour of \u2018light sleep\u2019<\/p>\n
This sleep fear, though, only chases sleep away on a biological level \u2013 altering your brain chemistry, increasing your cortisol levels. Cortisol, a hormone associated with stress, is naturally released by your body first thing in the morning to wake you up and get you going. So it\u2019s definitely not what you want your body to release in the middle of the night. Worse, sleep fear also suppresses melatonin, your sleep hormone, which makes sense on a primal level \u2013 after all, if your body perceives a threat, why would it let you sleep and be exposed to danger?<\/p>\n
Anxiety about sleep, then, only forces your body to wake you up.<\/p>\n
Feeling groggy doesn’t mean you slept badly<\/p>\n
So many people equate the groggy feeling on waking up with their sleep being inadequate \u2013 and then panic. However, this grogginess is a normal reaction caused by your brain taking time to move from sleep to full alertness \u2013 and can last up to half an hour.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s especially common if you\u2019ve woken from deep sleep stage \u2013 a stage when you\u2019re very asleep, and your brain is clearing out waste. You can reduce this feeling with a consistent wake-time: set your alarm for the same time, weekday and weekends. Your body cleverly adapts to this by automatically shifting your lighter sleep stages closer to that moment of wake-up. You\u2019re then less likely to be pulled out of deep sleep by your alarm and wake feeling clearer.<\/p>\n
Believe you slept well… even if you haven’t<\/p>\n
A std=udy published in 2011 in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research found that people who experienced objectively poor sleep (as measured in a sleep lab) but didn\u2019t perceive it as a problem were less likely to experience daytime fatigue and had better mood regulation and fewer \u00adsymptoms of depression, compared to those who worried about their sleep.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s about perception. I encourage my patients to reframe the impact of a bad night, before a big event, for example. Indeed, research in the Journal of \u00adExperimental Psychology in 2014 showed that believing you\u2019ve slept well \u2013 even when you \u00adhaven\u2019t \u2013 can improve your cognitive performance and mood the next day.<\/p>\n
This phenomenon, known as \u2018placebo sleep\u2019, highlights the power of mindset.<\/p>\n
Trackers can’t tell if you’re a couch potato<\/p>\n
Sleek, high-tech and whispering promises of better sleep with the power of \u2018data\u2019, sleep trackers are everywhere \u2013 from smartwatches to wearable rings.<\/p>\n
![\"For](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/104950077-15406607-For_the_two_decades_Stephanie_Romiszewski_has_worked_as_a_sleep_-a-11_17664223425.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
For the two decades Stephanie Romiszewski has worked as a sleep psychologist, her clinics have been filled with people with sleep disorders<\/p>\n
It feels empowering to quantify the mysterious hours you spend unconscious. But there\u2019s evidence sleep trackers can do more harm than good.<\/p>\n
Most consumer-grade sleep trackers use a combination of motion sensors and heart rate monitoring to infer sleep stages. But here\u2019s the catch: they\u2019re not measuring your actual sleep.<\/p>\n
With polysomnography, the gold standard method used in sleep clinics to assess sleep, sensors attached to your head and body record brain waves, eye movements, muscle activity, heart rate, breathing patterns and blood oxygen levels, while a camera records your movements.<\/p>\n
Sleep trackers, however, rely on algorithms to guess if you\u2019re asleep, awake or in a specific sleep stage.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why, if you\u2019ve binged a Netflix series while lying still, your tracker might credit you with an hour of \u2018light sleep\u2019 \u2013 for while trackers are great at detecting movement, they\u2019re terrible at understanding why you\u2019re not moving. Furthermore, researchers have found that when the tracker results are manipulated in studies to show that participants have had poor sleep \u2013 even when it\u2019s been good \u2013 their health outcomes are much the same as someone who did indeed sleep poorly. This is a crucial finding because it shows how influential these devices can be. Even when the data is false, it can have the same negative effects as actual poor sleep.<\/p>\n
That \u2018sleep score\u2019, then, is far more of an arbitrary measure than your tracker suggests. So it\u2019s important to understand that your sleep shouldn\u2019t be defined by a score, but by how you feel during the day.<\/p>\n
… and they’re worryingly addictive<\/p>\n
When you start using a sleep tracker, your brain may release dopamine, the chemical messenger associated with reward.<\/p>\n
Initially, this feels great. The act of using the tracker becomes rewarding, even if the device itself doesn\u2019t contribute meaningfully to sleep quality.<\/p>\n
Over time this can create a dopamine loop, where the brain begins to crave the \u2018reward\u2019 of using the tracker, reinforcing the dependency.<\/p>\n
But this has real consequences: the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, planning and managing expectations, starts to prioritise these external signals over your body\u2019s natural cues about how well you\u2019ve slept. This leads to heightened sleep anxiety.<\/p>\n
Don’t panic about enough ‘deep sleep’<\/p>\n
Another issue with trackers is the way they encourage us to attempt to micromanage the four stages of our sleep: light, stable, deep and REM.<\/p>\n
This is not only counterproductive, creating yet more sleep \u00adanxiety, it\u2019s actually biologically impossible. Sleep is a series of repeating cycles of the different stages. Each cycle lasts 90 minutes or so. A full night consists of four to five of these four cycles, and each stage within these cycles serves a different, crucial function.<\/p>\n
On average, it\u2019s normal to take around 20 minutes to fall asleep, and enter stage one, light sleep, where you transition from wakefulness to sleep, drifting in and out. This stage is around 5 per cent of overall sleep time.<\/p>\n
Stage two is stable sleep, around half of your total night\u2019s sleep time, when the brain does a clean-up, deciding what to remember or not. It\u2019s the vital bridge to move from light to deep sleep \u2013 yet is ignored by many sleep-tracking apps, which often group stable sleep into \u2018light sleep\u2019. Instead, they prefer to overemphasise the third and fourth stages of sleep: deep and REM.<\/p>\n
Deep sleep should be around 15-25 per cent of your overall sleep time: it\u2019s when your body tissues repair, muscles grow, and your brain flushes out waste. REM \u2013 or rapid eye movement \u2013 sleep is the dream stage, which should be around 20-25 per cent of your night. The lightest stage, it\u2019s crucial for processing emotions.<\/p>\n
Your body naturally works with your sleep stages to ensure you get the right amount of each you need. It doesn\u2019t necessarily make up for a lack of sleep by increasing total sleep time. Instead, it reallocates how much time you spend in certain sleep stages to prioritise what\u2019s missing.<\/p>\n
For instance, if you\u2019ve been physically exhausted or recovering from illness, your body will increase your percentage of deep sleep, even if your total sleep time stays the same.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve been emotionally drained or stressed, your body will increase REM sleep, even condensing deep sleep slightly to make room for it.<\/p>\n
This process is known as selective rebound \u2013 your brain\u2019s way of prioritising what\u2019s most important, even without increasing total sleep time.<\/p>\n
Despite sleep trackers\u2019 obsession with deep sleep and REM sleep \u2013 which, after all, sound \u00adsexier than plain old \u2018stable\u2019 sleep \u2013 all stages of sleep are vital. And we really can\u2019t control how much of each stage we get.<\/p>\n
This was proven when military organisations attempted to create \u2018super soldiers\u2019 who needed less sleep. They thought removing \u2018unnecessary\u2019 sleep stages while preserving deep sleep and REM would maximise performance. They stimulated the \u00adsoldiers\u2019 brains to eliminate light and stable sleep \u2013 but it only led to disoriented, memory- impaired soldiers.<\/p>\n
Crucially, studies have also shown that trackers are often less than 50 per cent accurate at identifying individual sleep stages compared to polysomnography. So when your app proudly tells you that you had 17 per cent REM sleep, take it with a very large pinch of salt.<\/p>\n
Adapted from Think Less, Sleep More by Stephanie Romiszewski (Atlantic Books, \u00a314.99), to be published January 1. \u00a9Stephanie Romiszewski 2026. To order a copy for \u00a313.49 (offer valid to 11\/01\/26; UK P&P free on orders over \u00a325) go to the Mail’s Bookshop<\/a> or call 020 3176 2937.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the two decades I\u2019ve worked as a sleep psychologist, my clinics have been filled with people with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[97,59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-330216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-dailymail","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}