# Beware of health anxiety

Over-fixation on sleep scores can hurt more than it helps.



## Takeaways

- Rule out disease before optimising.

- End-of-day tiredness is normal.

- Don't build a 12-step bedtime routine.



Galpin opens every sleep conversation with a warning: be wary of health anxiety — over-concern with little things in your bloodwork, your sleep, everything. Most of the 8 billion people on Earth need to pay more attention to their health, but if you're the kind of person who listens to a three-hour health podcast, you're probably not them.

Sleep medicine has a name for the tracker version of this: orthosomnia — people whose preoccupation with wearable data made their sleep worse.

Always place a problem on the spectrum from disease to optimisation. You should not be playing with optimisation if you're in the presence of a medical disease — and sleep is probably the biggest place of undiagnosed clinical disease that exists.

Feeling a little sleepy in the early afternoon and tired, unmotivated and unfocused at the end of the day is natural and needed. The post-lunch dip is a documented circadian feature.



## Sources

- Orthosomnia: are some patients taking the quantified self too far? (Baron KG, Abbott S, Jao N, Manalo N, Mullen R, 2017)

- The post-lunch dip in performance (Monk TH, 2005)

- Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: a joint consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society (Watson NF, Badr MS, Belenky G, et al., 2015)

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Educational summary of published research, not medical advice. Screening scores are not diagnoses. If a score is elevated or you feel unwell, talk to a clinician.

SleepShred for iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6802040541