Photo by Marcus Aurelius, pexels.com
Six years ago, in 2019, I bought a sleep-tracking ring. My interest came out of a research project I was working on at the time: with a team, we studied the behavior of 750 people across the U.S. for a year using sensors. Participants wore smartwatches to measure stress, activity, and sleep; Bluetooth devices tracked their location; and we prompted them throughout the day to report their emotions. Finding correlations between sleep, stress, and activity, motivated me to track my own sleep.
Before I used the tracker, I relied on my body’s signals: I might have felt refreshed and alert, or sluggish and drowsy. Once I got the ring, however, the first thing I did when I woke up was to check my sleep score. The data contains a range of measures—latency to fall asleep, total time asleep, time spent in REM and deep sleep, number of times awake, and an overall measure of sleep. The aggregate score on a scale of 0 to 100 shaped my mood for the day.
But sometimes the sleep data didn’t align with how I felt. A score of 70 might correspond with my feeling sharp and energetic, while a score of 92 sometimes coincided with my feeling tired and drowsy.
Yet I gave the tracker more weight than the signals in my own body. If the score was high, I powered through the day, rather than listening to my body to take it easy. Of course the data can be wrong but I had shifted from using the tool as a guide to relying on it as authority.
There is actually a term for this: orthosomnia—an unhealthy preoccupation with technology to perfect sleep, which can ironically lead to anxiety and worse sleep quality. But such a reliance is not unique to sleep apps. We track our steps, our eating, and much more.
Was my relationship with the sleep app a habit or a dependency? What’s the difference?
Habits develop as repeated behaviors strengthen neural pathways, a process called neuroplasticity. A habit is formed when we perform a particular behavior in a consistent context. Seeing my phone nearby upon awakening was a cue that activated a mental representation of opening the sleep app to check my data. The more frequently a behavior is performed, the stronger the habit becomes. And the more familiar the behavior becomes, the less cognitive effort is needed for doing the behavior. Eventually the behavior becomes automatic.
I had developed a mindset where my behavior to check my sleep app became more or less automatic. The problem is that I ignored other information, like my own body signals.
A study by researchers at University College London investigated how long it takes for a habit to become automatic. Participants were asked to regularly do healthy behaviors like eating fruit or drinking a bottle of water with lunch or exercising before dinner. They found that it took an average of 66 days for new types of behaviors to become automatic. Earlier repetitions of the behavior lead to automaticity faster; later repetitions have only an incremental impact. This means that the beginning of a new routine is when habits embed most deeply.
Habits often begin with goals: I used the sleep tracker to improve my sleep. Someone might initially turn to social media with the goal of being entertained, to see if a friend posted an update, or to procrastinate. But over time, seeing our smartphone on the table becomes a cue and then automatically we pick it up and swipe it open—even sometimes during a conversation. The habit is formed and the original goal may no longer be relevant.
A habit forms with repetition; a dependency satisfies a need. Checking news fulfills a need to find out what’s going on in the world, using a calculator reduces cognitive effort, and texting might satisfy a need to save time and effort involved in phoning or meeting face to face.
Not all of these lead to dependency. But when reliance on media grows so strong that self-regulation weakens—when we feel we can’t function without the tool—dependency takes hold. I became so dependent on my sleep app that I panicked if I woke up realizing I forgot to charge the ring.
My goal in purchasing the sleep tracker was to improve my sleep. But what I didn’t count on was that its continued usage led to a knock-on effect of losing trust in my own body signals about how alert or drowsy I felt.
The line between habits and dependency is blurry. Some models claim that habits lead to a dependency; others claim that first comes the dependency, and the habit is formed. Either way, digital technologies make both easy to form because they are so deeply woven into our daily lives.
We can use our smartphones without forming a habit or dependency, like when scanning a QR code or ordering an Uber. But problems arise when usage undermines important aspects of life: relationships, work, or as in my case, awareness of my own body.
The real challenge isn’t whether we use technology, but how we use it. Awareness is the first step: when you pick up your device ask yourself what purpose the device or app is serving, and whether it meets a genuine need or simply reinforces a habit. I now use my sleep tracker differently—checking it at the end of the day rather than first thing in the morning. I treat the data as just one input—supplementing rather than replacing my own sense of how I feel. It is no longer the authority, the centerpiece, and I’m now listening more closely to my body’s own signals. The balance between external tools and internal awareness may be the key to ensuring technology enhances rather than erodes our human abilities.
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You can learn more about how our digital devices affect us in my book Attention Span, now in paperback with exercises to improve your attention.