Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

- Steven Poole

As it solves old problems, information technology always creates new ones. The rise in wide accessibility of nutritional science (or pseudoscience), for example, has fuelled the growth of ‘orthorexia,’ or an unhealthy obsession with eating as healthily as possible. Orthosis the Greek for right or correct: etymologically, ‘orthopedics’ means ‘correct education’ and ‘orthography’ means ‘correct writing.’ The latest such construction is orthosomnia: an obsession with getting optimum sleep.

Now, sleep being perhaps the greatest consolation there is for being alive on this planet, orthosomnia doesn’t seem particularly worrying. But thanks to newfangled sleep-tracking devices, some customers end up referring themselves to sleep clinics not because they feel unrested, but because their trackers are telling them that they are not getting enough. One doctor, Alanna Hare, told the Guardian that she was increasingly seeing people “who probably didn’t have a problem until they started to become overly focused on their sleep”.