For Eric Harrison Riddle, sleep was one of the things in his wellness routine that he hadn’t put a lot of effort into. As a runner, he’d joined his local track club and made training a priority, but he eventually learned that if he wanted to really level up his performance, he’d have to prioritize his overnight recovery. He had struggled to get quality sleep since childhood, so he picked up a wearable sleep tracker in order to quantify the situation and learn what phase (REM, deep, and light) he was spending most of his time in on the quest for better shuteye.

“At first, it was fun,” he told GQ. “But if I had a ‘bad’ night of sleep and saw a low score, it would determine how I felt about that day. That crappy mood set in the morning hours and would follow me until the end of the day.”

Over time, he made the decision that he couldn’t let the device’s interpretation of his sleep impact him this much. And in fact, there is a scientific term for the way that Eric felt after seeing the less-than-stellar feedback: The “nocebo” effect. It's the reverse of the placebo effect, in which the expectation of good results creates them out of thin air—expecting a bad result makes it real. 

“It can be really frustrating,” says Samina Ahmed Jauregui, PsyD, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine. “You get this device: It’s supposed to help you figure out what's going on. Then, it can work against you, potentially reinforcing a faulty belief system. You think ‘I didn't sleep well last night, so I'm going to have a bad day,’—but what if you didn’t know that? Would you have the same attitude?”

Dr. Jauregui points out that not all “bad” sleep nights involve hours of tossing and turning. When you get wrapped up in what a wearable tells you versus doing an honest inquiry of how you really feel, that’s what things can get really messy. “You want to try harder the next day to get ‘better’ sleep based on what an app tells you,” she says. “And so the next day you're trying even harder to get to sleep and putting more emphasis on it and worrying more about it.”

Sleep tracking is booming: Apple made nighttime data a focus of a recent Watch revamp, the wrist-based tracking company Whoop is now worth billions, and the global market for sleep tracking devices has been predicted by forecasters to grow to almost $50 million by 2030, up from $12.8 million in 2020. In other words: There are a lot of people hunting to keep tabs on their shut-eye. But tracking your sleep does not always result in higher-quality sleep.  

“There’s definitely room for inaccurate data with these wearables,” says Dr. Michael Breus, a board-certified sleep specialist and psychologist. “Many of the trackers out there have started to be validated, but the data is still not 100% accurate. So when you see a low score, you should not freak out, just look at your data across the week for trends. This is where the information seems to be.”

If you’re the kind of person who feels as though they still can’t sleep after ditching the wearable, well, that’s when Dr. Jauregui says that could be the right time to speak with an expert one-on-one. “You have to separate fact from fiction, and make better sleep patterns and overall sleep hygiene for yourself,” she adds. “By addressing the cognitive side, you have the opportunity to impact any negatively held beliefs about sleep, your expectations for sleep, and the impact it's going to have on the next day.”

Riddle said these days he’ll check his device every now and again out of curiosity, but has made a greater effort improve his sleep hygiene: no TV in the bedroom, only using the bed for sleep or sex, and being better about consistent sleep and wake times—he’s already feeling better, no data required.

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