Sunday, 10th May
Your watch is working. The problem is what it gets recruited into.
There's a pattern that turns a 74% recovery score into something you feel you have to respond to. It has a clinical name, and it's older than wearables. It's the thing worth looking at.
The name is orthosomnia. Insomnia-like symptoms in people whose actual sleep is essentially fine, arising from the pursuit of perfect data. Not a sleep problem. A response-to-data problem. Recent prevalence work suggests it shows up in 3-14% of regular wearable users.
What I find clinically interesting is that the pattern is rarely about sleep. It's what I call The Repair Loop, the same loop most high-achieving professionals are running across multiple domains, finally turned on something with a faster feedback cycle.
The loop is what happens when the diagnostic instinct that built your career, the one that solves problems at work, gets pointed at your own internal state. A signal arrives, a low recovery score, a flat morning, a mid-meeting fog, and a sequence activates: identify the cause, apply a correction, monitor the outcome. In a professional context, that sequence builds careers. In an internal context, it tends to do something different. The thing being monitored doesn't respond well to being monitored.
What the wearable offers is a continuous, low-latency feedback channel. The loop loves this. There's always a number to interpret, an adjustment to consider, a hypothesis to test against tonight's data. The score becomes evidence about tomorrow. And the pattern, far from being interrupted by all the data, tends to be reinforced by it.
The intervention people reach for first is to take the watch off. In my experience that rarely reaches the pattern. It removes one channel from which the loop is expressing. The loop tends to find another.
What does begin to shift things is more specific. It tends to involve a different relationship to the data itself, one where the score stops functioning as a verdict on the morning and starts functioning as one input among several. The body's read goes first. The score arrives after.
It sounds simple but if you want to try a version of this, tomorrow morning, before you look at the watch, take a moment and read your own state. Does sleep feel deep, or thin. Is the morning sharp, or flat. Form a quick read. Then look at the number. Notice the gap, if there is one, between what your body told you and what the watch said.
Two things tend to be clinically interesting. The gap itself, when it shows up, and the urge to override the body's read with the watch's, even when the body's read came first. The urge tends to be a more reliable signal than the score.
I'll get further into this in the coming weeks. For now, if any of it's landing: the loop and the data are two different things. Hold them both lightly. Most of what wellness content treats as a sleep intervention is really an instruction to shut off a feedback channel. The loop is upstream of the channel.
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand
P.S. I write more on this every week. If you know someone who'd recognise this pattern, and I suspect you do, the subscribe is at albapsych.com.