Tracking Your Sleep Isn’t Helping Your Anxiety
Friends, I fear I’m about to embark on unpopular territory… (deep breath)… but here it goes.
Tracking your sleep isn’t helping your anxiety.
I know! I’m sorry! So many people love to track their sleep. That data just feels so satisfying — it lets you know how your body is working when you’re not even really there. And then you have all these reasons for how you feel. You have this gorgeous data that lets you know that you’re doing well. (I mean what perfectionist doesn’t want an A+ even when they’re unconscious?) Or it assesses whether you need some melatonin / that sleepy girl mocktail / less blue light / a wind down routine / a new roll of mouth tape (for real wtf). It feels empirical and useful and scientific. Tracking your sleep seems like an objectively good thing to do. Except… I low-key disagree.
It’s not just about tracking sleep (though that’s a particularly big culprit among my friends and my patients). And sleep isn’t really the issue here. It’s the tracking itself that’s the problem I want to address today.
Why Tracking Feels Good
You are a busy lady, my friend. It’s nice to think that you’ve got some backup when it comes to self-care. Tracking things like sleep, water, workouts, calories, meditation sessions, etc. feels like it can help you stay on track and assess where you need to make changes. Sometimes the scientific nature of tracking also feels satisfying. Now that you can look at objective data, you can truly optimize!
Figuring out what works for your body is also fantastic, and data can really support that quest. Maybe you’re curious about the impact of what you’re eating on your anxiety — keeping track of your caffeine might be really helpful here.
Tracking can also feel really motivating — if keeping a streak alive is the best way for you to get what you need, this can be a great tool. (Tracking can also feel a little too good for perfectionists. It scratches that itch to get a gold star a little too well, doesn’t it? Hmm… something to keep an eye on, perhaps.)
Some of these benefits are totally real, and if tracking feels healthy for you I’m not saying it’s 100% bad.
Why Tracking Isn’t Helping
That said, I do think there’s evidence that tracking is at least not helping your anxiety, and much of the time it can actually make anxiety worse.
First of all, how do you feel when you see negative data in your tracked behaviors? Do you have a tendency to become self-critical when the numbers aren’t looking good? For many people dealing with anxious perfectionism, setbacks or failure can be very painful and can even discourage perfectionists from trying again or setting new goals. Tracking, though potentially useful, can inadvertently invite discouraging data into our consciousness — perhaps you were having a pretty good day until you realized you didn’t get alllllll of your steps in.
Secondly, tracking can also easily creep into perfectionistic streaks, which quite simply isn’t helping. Yes, streaks can be motivating, but they can also reinforce perfectionistic tendencies that are not only painful but also impede your success.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the relationship between tracking, anxiety, perfectionism, and self-trust is really complex and often simply not helping you. This is because one major function of anxiety and perfectionism is that you end up trusting yourself less than you probably should. That anxious voice encourages you to trust “anxiety” more than you trust yourself. Anxiety wants you to make your life smaller — “ackkkk don’t drive! What if you get in a wreck!” — and discourages you from taking appropriate risks to allow you to live the life you want. Eventually, you actually start to trust the anxiety more than yourself.
The tracking can sometimes do the same thing. It’s not nearly as insidious as anxiety! But it decreases your self-trust in increments, encouraging you to check the data before you check in with your body. Anxiety therapy often includes a fair bit of relearning self-trust, and tracking can undermine this a bit.
What To Do Instead
This is getting a big contradictory isn’t it? “Ok, Dr. Rebecca, I’m not supposed to track, but I am supposed to keep my goals in mind / prioritize my values… what’s your plan here?”
In my video above I talk about “getting good at the measurement of you.” There are two parts to this, and they happen concurrently (i.e., you can work on both at once) — (1) improving the self-assessment of your needs and (2) building self-trust.
When you’re assessing your own needs, you’re checking in with yourself and getting really good at determining both how you’re doing now and what you need / want in the immediate future. I like to imagine this as determining what you’re “psychologically hungry for.” (Check out this podcast episode I did a few years ago for a little more in this area.)
Self-trust is a little more complex, and I want to give it the space it deserves, so click here for the next blog post for further details (publishing later in Oct!)
Build Self-Trust with the Help of Therapy for Anxiety in New Orleans, LA
If anxiety is undermining your ability to feel like you’re in charge (rude), book a session with a therapist who specializes in helping high-achievers feel more in control and less like they have to allow anxiety to make their lives smaller. Being high functioning doesn’t mean you don’t deserve help. If anxiety is becoming overwhelming, reach out to Rebecca AE Smith, Ph.D. and get some relief without sacrificing your success.
Services Offered With Rebecca AE Smith, Ph.D.
Are you a high-achieving woman struggling with anxiety, perfectionism, life transitions, and more? Therapy with Rebecca AE Smith, Ph.D. can help you work through your struggles or challenges to begin managing and coping with your symptoms in healthy ways. So in addition to navigating whether you’re experiencing stress or anxiety in Therapy for Anxiety, I offer Therapy for Women for those who struggle with burnout, stress, work-life balance, navigating relationships, and more. I also provide Therapy for Perfectionism for those struggling to overcome their symptoms and stress of feeling perfect all the time. In my practice, I provide online services for those in Louisiana and Virginia. For more about me check out my About Me page, Blog, and YouTube channel.