Sleepmaxxing: Is the pursuit of perfect sleep making us more anxious?
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The TikTok wellness trend might be doing more harm than good. If there’s one thing about me that those I know can agree on, it’s that I love my sleep. I haven’t always been very good at sleeping, and for many years I wrestled with insomnia and a chronic lack of deep sleep. Over the past six years, sleep has become an obsession for me and employed a raft of strategies, tools and technologies to improve my relationship with it.
![[Obsessively worrying about perfect sleep is known as orthosomnia]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/17/16/iStock-2086304133.jpg)
Earlier this year, I stumbled on a whole subgenre of TikTok content dedicated to the practices I’d been carefully researching and honing, so I was pretty thrilled. Sleepmaxxing is the latest viral wellness trend, but unbeknownst to me, I’d been doing it for almost a decade.
However, there were a few things about the trend that concerned me so I decided to take a closer look at my own habits and consult some experts about the practice of sleep optimisation. “The trend includes the use of various gadgets, techniques and supplements in an attempt to induce a deeper and longer sleep. In general, many people are combining a number of these techniques to optimise their chances of getting a good night’s sleep, in the hope of achieving specific physical and mental benefits.”.
A few years back, my chronic tiredness was interfering with my life. My memory was terrible, I found myself zoning out at work and experiencing heightened anxiety over the smallest things. I also felt like I was getting sick all the time and couldn’t work out why. Through research, I identified my lack of sleep was the problem. My sleeping hours were limited, I was spending most of my time in light sleep and I was waking up all of the time, which meant my body couldn’t recover and I felt as though I had a permanent hangover.
