I can see why you might say, Liz, this sounds benign and obvious. What’s the big deal? And I think about a meeting I had in 2014 with a freelance writer who was wearing three fitness trackers, inadvertently imitating Madonna’s 1980s stacked bracelets look. He asked me how I slept. I was — and am — a pretty good sleeper. I snooze heavily for seven to eight hours and wake up feeling good, sometimes even before my alarm goes off because I am (sorry) a morning person.
The freelancer I’d been speaking to, perhaps obviously, had been having trouble sleeping, and as someone who was fairly devoted to optimizing his life through fitness tracking, he’d been troubled by his subpar sleep. I still believe he might have slept better if he’d taken those trackers off — because one way to ensure you’ll have a bad night of sleep is to worry you’ll have a bad night of sleep. Putting pressure on yourself to sleep well often backfires.
