Orthosomnia: When Perfect Sleep Becomes an Obsession

Orthosomnia describes an excessive preoccupation with achieving ideal sleep, often reinforced by consumer sleep technologies and device-generated metrics. As sleep becomes increasingly measured, scored, and optimized, information intended to improve sleep may instead contribute to vigilance, rigidity, and sleep-related stress. This creates a paradox consistent with the attention-intention-effort model of insomnia: sleep depends partly on automaticity and reduced arousal, yet the pursuit of perfect sleep may increase monitoring, effort, and concern about normal night-to-night variation. Consumer sleep technologies can provide useful information, but their outputs may acquire disproportionate authority when interpreted as definitive judgments about sleep quality. Orthosomnia may therefore extend beyond wearable use itself, reflecting a broader pattern of perfectionism, behavioral rigidity, and excessive sleep effort. Clinically, the important question may be whether sleep data remain informative or have begun to govern behavior. For selected patients, management may require less monitoring, greater behavioral flexibility, and renewed emphasis on daytime function and subjective restoration. Perfect sleep may become most elusive when normal variation is treated as failure.