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Let the number inform, not drive
A sleep tracker reports a bad night and predicts a bad day, and the person starts architecting their life around hitting the right number. In the ideal case, the number points at something real, like drinking too much, and leads to a change in diet. Someone who sleeps on a normal mattress and wakes up feeling off can take a cold shower or go to the gym.
The same pattern runs through everything that gets a metric. Performance data on social media posts can lead a YouTuber or podcaster into audience capture. A sleep score is probably worse on a Saturday after three beers with friends on a Friday, and nothing quantifies how fun that night was or the social benefit of three Heinekens over Heineken zeros. Metric chasing and performance chasing, without thinking through how to orchestrate a life and what goal is being optimized, leaves people running around in circles with a number driving their decisions.
Can sleep tracking itself cause poor sleep?
Sleep researchers at Rush University Medical Center, led by Kelly Baron, described a pattern they named orthosomnia in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. Patients arrived with sleep tracker data and anxiety about getting perfect scores, and the worry itself disrupted their sleep. The term combines the Greek prefix for correct with the word insomnia. Consumer trackers estimate sleep stages from movement and heart rate, which are less precise than the brain-wave measurements used in a sleep lab.
How does Goodhart's law explain metric chasing?
British economist Charles Goodhart made the observation in a 1975 paper on monetary policy, noting that a statistical regularity tends to collapse once it is used for control. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern later restated it in the form most people know: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. A number only stands in for the thing a person actually cares about. Once the number is optimized directly, it can move without the underlying thing moving.
What is audience capture?
Writer Gurwinder Bhogal popularized the term in a 2022 essay. He described creators who drift, step by step, toward whatever content earns the strongest reaction from their audience, until the audience is steering the creator's views. Analytics dashboards make the feedback fast and precise, which speeds the drift. The term applies to anyone whose output is judged by public metrics.
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