In defense of not tracking sleep

I’ve gone through phases of tracking and not tracking my sleep for years. Tracking it tends to make me feel worse.

I know I need need at least 7 (preferably 8) hours of solid, uninterrupted sleep to be at my best. I know that. And if I wake up to an app telling me “you only got 23 minutes of deep sleep” or “you woke up briefly 14 times” or “you slept like straight up water trash” then I’m biased towards feeling crappy all day, even if I would have otherwise thought I slept just fine.

On those days, I spend the rest of the day thinking “ugh, I didn’t sleep well, this sucks” and anything (mental or physical) that doesn’t feel tippety-top makes me think “well it’s no wonder, considering how I slept” and it perpetuates. By the end of the day, it’s full-on victim mindset. I’ve convinced myself that it was a crappy day, and it’s all thanks to a bad night’s sleep that I wouldn’t have even known about if I wasn’t tracking it.

I’d like “how I feel” to be the thing that determines how I feel, not a graph on an app dashboard.