Do You Trust Your Sleep Score More Than Yourself? | Orthosomnia & Listening to Your Body

<p>Does your sleep tracker tell you how you slept before you ask yourself how you feel? Orthosomnia, an obsession with the perfect sleep score, is growing, and this episode is about trusting ourselves and listening to our body again. When we need a screen to tell us how we feel, the data has started to outrank our knowing.</p><p>The BBC recently shared the story of a woman who spent three years obsessed with her sleep score. One night she was awake from 1 AM until 5 AM, and in the morning her watch congratulated her on a great night's sleep. The device said one thing. Her body knew another. Sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley told the BBC that when a tracker gives us a number, the number becomes a target, and we start worrying about our sleep based on figures.</p><p>That moment continues The Inside Job, Out in the World, my four-week series. Each week I take one moment from out in the world and pair it with a past episode that speaks directly to what is underneath it. Because the work we do on this podcast, building Mental Fitness, self-worth and Self-Love from the inside out, is not done in isolation. It shows up in the world, in our culture, in our news. This is week three.</p><p>After the introduction you will hear Episode 76 in full. I recorded it after a visit to a sleep specialist at New York University's Langone Health, where I expected a sleep study and was told to stop watching the clock and listen to my body. I share how wellness terms like nervous system regulation, polyvagal theory, co-regulation and somatic practices can pull us into our heads and away from our bodies, and why we do not need the terminology to do deep, real inner work. I'd like to be clear: the science of sleep is real and it matters, and diagnosed sleep disorders need medical care. What I am looking at is where we are placing our attention.</p><p>If you have ever let a number tell you how you feel, this conversation is for us. This series is not about the exceptional. It's about the human. About us as humans.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>In this episode you’ll learn:</strong></p><p>    •    What orthosomnia is, and why doctors are seeing more of it</p><p>    •    How a number on a sleep tracker becomes a target, and why that can keep us up at night</p><p>    •    What a sleep specialist told me when I went looking for answers about my sleep</p><p>    •    Why reading about the nervous system can take us further away from listening to our body</p><p>    •    Why you can do deep, real inn