Nothing ruins the relaxation of a good night’s sleep quite like getting graded on it the next morning. In “Why I Stopped Tracking My Sleep,” the author explains that years of scrutinizing recovery scores eventually made him more stressed and less rested. Researchers have coined the term “orthosomnia” for an obsessive pursuit of optimal sleep driven by tracker data. There’s also the “nocebo” effect: seeing a lousy score can make you feel worse about your night even if you woke up reasonably refreshed. Detailed tracking can still be useful when you’re training for a major race or pursuing a specific fitness goal, but the author makes a good case for easing off when optimization starts doing more harm than good. For a different kind of data, we’ve been loving the Ozlo Sleepbuds 2. Their case sensors measure noise, light, and temperature around your bed, helping you identify external disruptions without necessarily assigning your sleep a passing or failing grade (though the buds do provide sleep quality tracking if you’re into that too). In our review, we found those environmental readings especially useful because they diagnose sleep environment problems right away. We recently covered one of those variables in “Control bedroom noise for better recovery,” which noted that experts generally recommend keeping nighttime noise around 25 to 30 decibels. For a few oddball experiments, “These weird sleep tips could help you fall asleep” covered briefly getting out of bed when sleep won’t come, cooling off with chilled damp socks, and trying the military sleep method. That should be plenty to work on without turning bedtime into a performance review.

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