I spent a decade in darkened sleep labs, tethered to patients by a web of electrodes, watching the raw data of human rest flicker across a monitor. I’ve seen people weep because their expensive smartwatch told them they had “poor recovery,” when in reality, they were just stressed about the very device on their wrist. If you are currently scrolling through endless charts, trying to figure out how to spot patterns in your sleep based on a proprietary “sleep score” from a piece of plastic, please stop. Most of those metrics are educated guesses at best, and they are doing…

I’ve spent seventeen years in NHS sleep clinics, and if I had a pound for every time a patient came to me clutching a printout of their Oura ring’s “sleep score” as if it were gospel, I’d have retired a decade ago. These wearables are fine for counting steps, but they are terrible at telling you why you feel like a ghost during your 3 p.m. meeting. If you want to actually solve the puzzle of your exhaustion, you need to stop obsessing over digital percentages and learn how to keep a sleep diary that actually contains useful data. I’m…

I spent ten years in a darkened sleep lab, watching people twitch and gasp while wired to a headbox, so I have a very low tolerance for the nonsense currently being sold as “wellness.” If you think that checking your smartwatch at 3:00 AM to see a colorful graph of your REM cycles is the way to figure out how to assess your own sleep honestly, I have some bad news: you’re being lied to. Those devices aren’t measuring your brain waves; they are making educated guesses based on how much you move, and quite often, those guesses just end…

I spent a decade in darkened sleep labs, watching patients twitch and gasp while tethered to a headbox, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the wellness industry is selling you a fantasy. You’ve been told that “optimising” your life requires expensive supplements, blue-light blocking glasses, and a dozen different apps to track your REM cycles, but most of that is just expensive noise. We need to stop treating sleep like a luxury performance metric and start looking at the messy, biological reality of how sleep and wellbeing interact. The truth is often much simpler—and much more…