Hey folks, Pratham here.
Welcome back to Paradox Weekly, a Masters' Union newsletter, where we break down the ideas, trends, and contradictions shaping business today.
Everyone I respected was wearing one, posting their recovery scores like a morning report card.
Two weeks in, I was sleeping worse than I had in years despite nothing changing in my life other than this gadget.
Turns out that I had started reading a number the moment I woke up, and on the nights it said I slept badly, I felt it all day, even when I had felt fine before I looked.
The device I bought to fix my sleep had become the reason it was getting worse and that's what today's paradox is.
Open Instagram or TikTok and you will find tens of millions of posts tagged sleepmaxxing.
The word borrows from looksmaxxing, and the idea is the same: treat sleep like a stat you can grind.
At the far end, influencers promote rope-assisted neck swinging as an insomnia cure but unfortunately most of it is not backed by much.
A team at George Washington University reviewed the research behind the mouth-taping claims and found the majority unsupported.
Stanford's Clete Kushida went further, telling National Geographic he has heard of patients developing aspiration pneumonia after taping their mouths shut.
But behind every one of these routines, is a tracker such as a ring, a watch or more specifically a whoop or oura.
You cannot maxx what you cannot measure, so the whole trend rests on the assumption that the measurement is right but it mostly isn’t.
Against a proper clinical sleep test, these wearables are good at telling asleep from awake, but the moment they split your night into light, deep and REM, even the best of them get the stages wrong somewhere between a fifth and half the time.
And these numbers we rely on is what’s causing the damage.
A multicentre study in JMIR tested 11 consumer sleep trackers against polysomnography, the clinical gold standard, across nearly 350,000 sleep epochs.
On stage classification, the best device scored 0.69. The worst scored 0.26.
Even Oura's own published research, the company's best case for itself, reports 79% accuracy on four-stage classification.
The maker's own numbers concede the device misreads roughly one moment in five.
So the deep-sleep figure you woke up worried about this morning is an estimate, produced by a device that cannot see your brain, inferring your brainwaves from your pulse and your movement.
And what should bother you is that a wrong number still does real damage.
In a 2018 experiment, insomnia patients were given fake feedback on how they had slep, and the ones told they had slept badly reported feeling measurably more tired and mentally slower the whole day, even though the feedback was random.
A separate study wired students to a fake sleep monitor and fed them a made-up "below average" score. They went on to perform worse on attention and processing tests than the ones told they had slept well, regardless of how they had slept.
A bad score can manufacture a bad day out of a good night and the score does not even have to be real to do it.
Sleep researcher Kelly Baron documented patients walking into her clinic convinced they had a sleep disorder, entirely on the say-so of their tracker.
One woman had already been treated successfully and still refused to believe she was fine, because her Fitbit disagreed and she trusted the Fitbit over the clinic.
Baron's team named it orthosomnia, built on the same root as orthorexia, the eating disorder where chasing perfectly healthy food becomes the illness itself.
The mechanism is old and well understood.
Effort is a form of alertness, and alertness is the enemy of sleep.
It is so backwards that one accepted treatment for insomnia, paradoxical intention, is to lie there and actively try to stay awake.
Sleepmaxxing culture made it the only target.
Oura just filed for a US IPO on the back of a roughly $11 billion valuation, 5.5 million rings sold, and a subscription business on track to cross 5 million paying members this quarter.
Whoop skips the hardware markup and sells you the subscription straight. It was valued at $10.1 billion in March.
I am not saying anyone sat in a room and designed it to make you anxious.
The incentive rewards your checking far more than it rewards your calm, and a small dose of worry is the most reliable reason to check anything.
So a guess with fair-to-moderate accuracy gets sold as a precise daily grade, an obsessive trend hands over the audience primed to take that grade seriously, and the business model does better when the grade stings.
For plenty of people a tracker is a harmless, useful mirror.
The damage starts when the mirror turns into a judge, and you stop asking how you feel and start asking what you scored.
The people most likely to fall for that are us.
In a 2026 survey of 1,002 adults, about 23% of users aged 18 to 35 said their sleep app stresses them out about their sleep, against 2.4% of those over 66.
The exact crowd that loves to optimise is the crowd the optimising winds up the most.
And the score is arriving here fast.
The best customer a sleep company can have is the person who never quite believes they slept well, and reaches for the app every morning to check.
I took the Whoop off.
I sleep by how I feel when I wake up now, which is how people managed it for a few hundred thousand years before a ring offered to grade them on a guess.
Hit reply: do you check your sleep score every morning and does it bother you if it’s low?
I read every email.
Until next week,
Pratham