One sheep, Two sheep...

There are all kinds of crazy now a days. Swiggy crazy, Netflix crazy, Myntra crazy...an endless list. One of those trending crazy things, in my experience, is the smart watch. Smart watch is smart alright - It keeps you on your toes, measures your heart rate, and adds color to your life in fun shades and shapes. It only stops short of foretelling your maid's moods or your better half's mental health. While this bling thing is armed with fancy stuff, why I call it crazy is bcoz of its sleep tracker. 

I'm sure some of you can relate to this phenomenon that runs in my family - what I like to call sleep obsession, or rather, sleep tracking obsession. I recall my aunt telling me a few years ago, it was almost as if she had swallowed a clock before bed time. Such was the precision with which she could tell the time when she woke up for a bio break and the number of times she woke up. Her precision was to the milli secondth level. As a family, as you can imagine, we were obsessed over how many hours we slept, how well we slept, how many times we tossed and turned, yada yada yada. 

With the advent of smart watches, we could give our bio clocks a breather coz the app did the job for us. Even a very low end smart watch was powered with this sleep tracking feature. The price you paid for the watch impacted the extent of analysis that the watch maker could do with your sleep data, except of course ensuring that if you paid more, your sleep graphs probably showed prettier colors. The price you paid for the watch did not impact the quantity or quality of your sleep, mind you.

If anything, it only made matters worse. Our morning rituals began to include the smart watch app sync and tracking our weekly sleep scores , reading fun facts about sleep and subscribing to more Instagram pages on sleep health. Stories of the erstwhile SAP CEO who, courtesy random Whatsapp forwards, lost his life due to poor sleeping habits despite being a fitness freak, increased our sleep anxiety.

Cognizant of this peace-wrecking sleep tracking habit, I decided to let my Fitbit get some rest in the nights too. I stopped looking up my watch for time, everytime I woke up and also removed all clocks from my room. I consciously stopped slicing and dicing sleep data and stopped inquiring about how many hours my 30 something friends slept. While it may be true that what cannot be measured cannot be managed, we can limit the influence of our bosses' favorite quotes to working hours alone?

Lets enjoy those weekend afternoon siestas, more importantly, not fret over lost sleep due to that crazy assignment. Let's sleep over this a bit, shall we?!