Ah, sleep. Once a simple, blissful act of unconsciousness, now a high-stakes performance arena where your Fitbit judges your every REM cycle and your magnesium supplements whisper sweet nothings about your sleep score. Welcome to the age of 'sleepmaxxing', where the pursuit of perfect slumber has turned bedtime into a minefield of anxiety, gadgets, and questionable life choices.

Take it too far, and you might find yourself with a case of 'orthosomnia' - a clinical term that sounds like a rare dinosaur but is actually an obsession with achieving perfect sleep. While not officially recognized as a condition in the UK, doctors are seeing patients who are convinced they have sleep disorders, armed with tracker data that says otherwise. This fixation, they warn, is making sleep worse. Because nothing says 'relax' like checking your sleep score while your heart rate spikes in panic.

So how did we get here? It all started innocently enough with the Fitbit Classic in 2009, the first fitness tracker to include sleep analysis. Now, Garmin, Whoop, Apple, and a parade of smart rings like Oura, Ultrahuman, and RingConn all offer nightly reports on your sleep stages - awake, light, deep, and REM - plus a handy 'sleep score' to tell you how you did, as if sleep were a video game level.

But here's the kicker: that sleep score is 'completely made up,' says Dr Alanna Hare, a sleep medicine consultant at London's Royal Brompton Hospital. 'There's nothing recognised in sleep science that is a sleep score,' she tells the BBC. 'That's just been created by manufacturers.' Dr. Hare has noticed trackers causing anxiety among her patients, some of whom bring in data and questions that, ironically, contribute to their sleep difficulties. Even reassuring medical tests haven't calmed their fears. 'It's great that there's more focus on sleep as part of wellness,' she adds, 'but sleep just does not respond well to attempts to perfect it.'

And the trackers might not even be accurate. A proposed lawsuit against Oura, filed last month in San Francisco, alleges that the rings rely on AI-generated estimates that have 'a coin flip's chance of being correct' when measuring sleep quality and stages. Oura, of course, denies this, saying it 'stand[s] behind our science, research and accuracy claims.' Sure, and we stand behind our ability to sleep after reading that.

Even if trackers are accurate, they can mess with your day. In a University of Oxford study, participants were given sleep scores that were randomly assigned and had nothing to do with their actual sleep. Those told they'd slept badly reported feeling more fatigued and were less mentally alert - proving that if you're told you slept poorly, you'll feel like garbage, even if you didn't.

Take Jess Hill, a 32-year-old HR professional from London, who got a Garmin watch and became obsessed with her sleep score for three years. 'I would think, 'I've had awful sleep so I'm going to really struggle today,' even if I actually probably had okay sleep,' she tells the BBC. The obsession ended when she realized the watch was lying: 'I was awake the other week for four hours in the night, and my watch was like 'wow, great sleep!' - I literally was awake from 01:00 until 05:00.' Garmin has been approached for comment, presumably to explain how 'up all night' equals 'great sleep.'

Dr Neil Stanley, sleep expert and author of 'How to Sleep Well,' argues that gamifying sleep creates more disordered sleeping. 'The thing with tracking your sleep is that it gives you a number, and this means you have a target,' he says. 'So you get into this cycle of worrying about your quality of sleep or the quantity of sleep based on figures.' He notes that commercial trackers work by measuring movement, much like the actigraphy devices he researched 40 years ago - and they share the same limitations. 'Unless you're measuring the brain's activities, you're not measuring sleep,' he says. So unless you're willing to wear an EEG cap to bed, your tracker is just guessing.

So what's the elusive secret to good sleep? Dr. Hare suggests the usual suspects: keep your bedroom 'coolish, darkish and quietish' (no need for pitch black or a 16C icebox), get bright light in the morning to regulate your circadian rhythm, do light exercise, and eat a 'healthy, Mediterranean-style diet with plenty of plant variability.' Above all, keep it simple. 'Anything else, you don't need it.' So go ahead, ditch the tracker, and trust that you'll know if you slept well when you don't feel like a zombie. Your sleep score won't mind.