In a culture that’s highly goal-oriented, yet another form of performance anxiety has emerged: It’s called orthosomnia , and it refers to an unhealthy preoccupation with getting the right amount of sleep as well as the right stages of sleep.
The term was coined in 2017 by researchers who were seeing a growing number of patients seeking treatment for self-diagnosed sleep disturbances based on data provided by their sleep trackers, explains Kelly Baron, a clinical psychologist who leads the behavioral sleep medicine program at the University of Utah and lead researcher on the paper that named the term. “Ortho” means straight or correct, and “somnia” means sleep. The researchers chose this term because of its similarity to a condition called orthorexia, an unhealthy preoccupation with he