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If you're not sleeping well and you're wearing a tracker, this is for you!


Many people with insomnia assume tracking their sleep is a good idea. I used to think that too.


I’ve been wearing a whoop for about a year. But I don't recommend tracking for most of my clients who are struggling with sleep — and today I'm going to tell you exactly why.


Here's what we're going to cover: whether trackers are actually accurate, and more importantly, whether tracking is helping or hurting you specifically. Because the answer is different depending on you and your situation.


By the end of this, you'll know exactly whether you should be tracking your sleep right now, and what to pay attention to instead.


00:00 Should You Track Sleep

00:43 When Tracking Fuels Anxiety

01:29 When Tracking Can Help

02:15 How Accurate Trackers Are

03:31 HRV and Real World Testing

04:20 Using Trackers for Fitness

04:51 Program Break and Next Steps

05:17 Ortho Somnia Explained

06:47 Focus on How You Feel

07:18 Client Story Paul’s Turnaround

08:08 Wrap Up and Watch Next


Episode Transcript


[00:00:00] If you're not sleeping well and you're wearing a tracker, you need to hear this. Many people with insomnia, assume tracking their sleep is a good idea. I used to think that too. I've been wearing a whoop for about a year now, but I actually don't recommend tracking for most of my clients who are struggling with sleep, and today I am going to tell you exactly why.


Here's what we're going to cover: whether trackers are actually accurate, and more importantly whether tracking is helping or hurting you specifically because the answer is different depending on you and your situation. By the end of this, you'll know exactly whether you should be tracking your sleep right now and what to pay attention to instead.


Many of my clients are actually really anxious about sleep. For example, my client, Andrew, who had been having a hard time sleeping since he was 14 years old, and he was in his late twenties, so pretty much half his life. He spent all day thinking about sleep. His [00:01:00] cortisol was spiking at night. We could see that on his lab results.


And so for him, tracking his sleep was not gonna help. Because someone who's already anxious about sleep, the tracking's just gonna make them even more anxious about it. And if you already know you aren't sleeping well, you don't need a tracker to actually show you that.


And one of my clients, Brad, realized that the tracking was making him more anxious, so he stopped wearing his Oura ring before we even started working together.


And I have a current client right now who's wearing an Oura ring and tracking her sleep, and she wants more REM and deep sleep. And so we talked about how it's not always accurate, and I'll dive into that more in a minute. But it's more important how she feels. However, she has seen her sleep score improving over the past couple months that we've been working together.


So if someone doesn't let the anxiety about tracking get to their head and can [00:02:00] just use it as data, then it can be a valuable tool.


That's what I mean by it's different for everyone. So for some people it could totally be hurting their sleep and making that anxiety about sleep worse, and for some people it can actually be helping.


Now let's talk about the accuracy of trackers because they aren't very accurate, especially for sleep stages. Now, the gold standard for measuring sleep is a polysomnography that is used in a clinical sleep study. There was a recent study in 2025 that tested six popular devices against that standard. Determining what sleep stage someone is in is where they all fail. Every single device misclassified, waking time, deep sleep, and REM as light sleep.


The best device was actually the Apple Watch, which still only had moderate accuracy.[00:03:00] 


Deep sleep was the worst. Whoop was most accurate at about 70%. The Apple Watch at 51%. Fitbit was under 50.


So even the best device, the whoop, still gets deep sleep wrong, nearly one in three times. That's not very accurate.


They do better with total sleep time. That does tend to be more accurate, although my experience with the whoop doesn't necessarily match that. And with heart rate variability.


Now, Oura's supposed to be the most accurate for heart rate variability with about 6% error, and whoop comes in second at about an 8% error. However, I have tested my whoop against a chest drop because when I got my whoop, it showed that my HRV was in the thirties, which is not good. We want it high, like at least 50, so I was freaking out a little bit. So I ended up ordering a chest drop [00:04:00] and sure enough it was in the fifties to 60.


So I think that the trends are valuable, and so if my whoop is saying it's lower one day and higher the next day. I think that is true. Just the absolute value is definitely not true, at least for the newest Whoop. And I don't know about the other devices specifically.


But I also know with whoop that many times that I'm awake, it will show that I'm in light sleep and I don't really use it for sleep. I actually got it. Now that I'm sleeping well, I use it. I like to see stress throughout the day. I like to track my activities and my weightlifting and my HRV and my resting heart rate. So I'm more using it as a fitness and health device than just for sleep because I know it's not totally accurate.


Quick pause before we continue. If you're tracking your sleep and still not sleeping better, the problem is that the tracker isn't telling you [00:05:00] why you weren't sleeping well, and that's what I help people figure out in my Complete Sleep Solution program. If you want help understanding what's actually driving your sleep issues and a step-by-step plan to fix it, you can book a consultation with me using the link in the description.


Now if you are already worried about sleep, tracking can make it worse. There's actually a name for this, it's called Ortho Somnia. And that's the obsession with getting a perfect sleep score on a sleep tracker. So then checking your score becomes another thing to monitor and another way to fail. A bad score first thing in the morning can determine how you feel the rest of the day.


Like my client, Andrew, who spent all day thinking about sleep and couldn't focus on anything else, a tracker would've just made that worse.


Now if you can detach for it and see it just as data, it can help. So using it to track progress is great, versus [00:06:00] using it to diagnose what's wrong. It's not going to tell you what's actually wrong.


So it's really helpful if you're already improving and want to see the trend over time. And if you're testing different things as we're working together, it can help you see what's working, which really just helps keep you motivated and want to keep doing it.


So for my client who is wearing the Oura ring, seeing her sleep score improving over the past couple months, even before we got her test results back and she started the full protocol, that was really helpful that the little things she had changed that she thought wouldn't matter, like adding more protein with meals and getting more steps during the day actually made a a big difference.


I wanna tell you, this is what's most important is how you feel when you wake up and during the day. That is more important than what any tracker will ever tell you. And so that's why we don't [00:07:00] want your tracker to say, oh, you didn't sleep well last night, or Your HRVs really low, and that determines how you feel.


You want to assess how you feel first, and then look at your tracker and say, oh, this makes sense, or maybe it doesn't make sense. But how you feel is most important.


I. I want to tell you about my client, Paul. 'cause when he came to me, he hadn't been able to sleep for the past six weeks before. And he was of course miserable and feeling really isolated.


When working together, two months in, he texted, I slept nine hours. And by the end of six months, he was back at the gym. He was in his words, feeling like a champ again. He was finding more opportunities at work because he was getting great sleep.


And so by the time we were wrapping up, he bought an Apple watch. He didn't want it for sleep. He just wanted one. And so he uses the sleep data now as confirmation, but not something to worry about.[00:08:00] 


He gets eight and a half to nine hours consistently now, and he knows he slept well before he even looks at what his tracker said.


That's the goal, to wake up and feel it not to have a device tell you how you should feel and how you slept.


And if you want to see Paul's experience working together and what his lab results showed, what I recommended to help him get back in balance and get his sleep back,


You can watch his video next.

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