Wake up to the bigger picture on how to get a better night’s sleep

When trying to create a healthy habit, it often helps to be mindful. So it’s easy to understand why sleep trackers, which claim to detect what happened while users were away from home, have become so popular among those seeking better rest. These devices promise to monitor not only the duration of your sleep, but the depth and quality of your sleep as well. They even provide insight into how cheerful you should expect to feel the next day.

Most sleep scientists warn that the data these devices record is unreliable, but regardless of whether or not we can trust the information they provide, focusing too heavily on numbers can leave people unjustifiably concerned about the quality of their sleep. This obsessive approach to improving comfort, coined as orthosomnia, only makes matters worse. In other words, data overload can keep you up at night.

There’s another reason to avoid such intense focus on what’s happening while the lights are out if you’re hoping for more blinking: You’re missing the bigger picture. Good sleep is essential to our long-term health, however, as we explore in our special issue beginning with… “The New Science of Sleep: How to Sleep Better, Whatever Your Lifestyle”Good sleep doesn’t just happen in the bedroom.

Take diet, for example. A growing body of evidence suggests that a healthy gut microbiome leads to better sleep and vice versa (see: 1). “The surprising connection between your microbiome and good sleep”), so if you want to sleep better, what you eat matters.

It would also be a mistake to expect our sleep requirements to be the same every night or identical to those of others. We are increasingly learning that our needs are individual (see “Why your chronotype is the key to knowing how much sleep you need”) and variable, due to factors such as our age and fluctuations in hormones (see “A better understanding of our hormones and sleep can improve both.”).

So, while the way we approach our actual hours of sleep can of course improve it (for personalized advice from experts, see “What nine sleep researchers do to get the best night’s rest”), all of this suggests that we can relieve the pressure to create the ideal conditions for bedtime and realize that it is not only subconscious hours that determine good sleep. What we do throughout our waking day can make a big difference, too.