Zzzzzzzz...And, yes, there's an app for that. Lots of them.

Did "simple nervous tension keep you awake last night?"

Well, yes and no. I wouldn't say fretting about what Trump's up to, what Bernie's up to, whether I'll run out of Purell to ward off Coronavirus before the epidemic abates, and how there's no escape from speculation about whether Tom Brady is going to dump the Patriots is "simple nervous tension." It's complex nervous tension.

The truth is, I don't sleep as well as I used to. I usually wake up at some point to pee. Sometimes I just wake up, turn on the light, and read for a bit. Sometimes I'll check in with Twitter to check on the latest outrage. Sometimes I just can't sleep. And that does make me pine for the days when I turned off the light and was out like one.

Nowadays I don't expect to get in 7.5 to 8 hours uninterrupted sleep.

But nowadays, it doesn't matter all that much. 

Yes, there are at least two days a week when I have to be up at the crack of dawn to get to my volunteer work. But I don't have a job to get to. Mostly, I can lay in bed in the morning. On days when I have to get up - and didn't get a great night's sleep the night before - I can take a nap. This, of course, may screw up the coming night's sleep, but there you have it.

Back in the days when Sominex asked us about "simple nervous tension" messing with our circadian cycle, they had a simple answer:

Take Sominex tonight and sleep, safe and restful, sleep, sleep, sleep.

I've never taken a sleeping pill, but they've been on offer for a very long time.

But sleep  - or lack thereof - used to be a personal matter. Or a matter that went no further than the family: drowsy dad, grouchy mom, cranky kids. In today's world, employers, concerned that their workers aren't getting enough sleep to work at peak rates, are deciding that your sleep habits are their business. And they're deploying - what else - "high tech solutions" to help employees get their zzz's.

After several years of recognizing sleep’s role in productivity and controlling health-care costs, some employers are actively giving employees tools to do something about it, taking advantage of new hardware and apps to affect behavioral changes.

While experts applaud the attention being paid to workers’ sleep, some raise questions about privacy or how useful sleep data, if it’s provided without context, will be for many employees. (Source: WaPo)

Dayzz is a "mobile app that offers personal recommendations for better sleep."

Do we really need an app that sends you a reminder to turn off the TV you're watching while sitting in bed? Or an alert that if they're restless, they might want to get up and listen to some chillaxin' music?

Apparently the makers of Dayzz think so, and they back it all up with sleep coaches you can chat online with if all the suggestions fail. 

New Balance is one of the companies offering weary employees use of Dayzz. (Is one of the suggestions to lace up a pair of sneaks and take a nice long run?)

Black Rock is giving its prime employees Oura Rings, "a sleep and activity tracker." Now their portfolio managers are more aware about the impact of never turing their screens off.

Oura, which combines body temperature, resting heart rate and the previous night’s sleep into a “readiness score,” sends users a daily alert. It might tell them to “take it easy,” for instance, if the score is low after a late steak dinner with wine kept their heart rate high during the night.

Maybe I'm just more keenly aware than most, but does someone need an alert-sending ring to let them know that "a late steak dinner with wine" is going to oogy up their sleep? One of the worst night's sleep I ever had was one that topped off a late dinner with wine with an Irish Coffee. The combo of the whiskey downer with the caffeine upper... Talk about the no sleep zone. No app needed to warn me off that in the future.

But, hey, Twitter's Jack Dorsey sports an Oura Ring, so...

At least with Oura Ring, you just need to put a ring on it. Beddr has a sensor "users stick to their foreheads." Bet that works wonders for their sex life.  Ditto for Dreem, a "sleep headband that tracks brain activity." Sleep headband? Groovy!

All thse apps, of course, raise concerns about what employers might decide to do with the data collected by these smart apps - if and when they can get their lusting-after-big-data little hands on it.

Do you really want your employer to know how many times you toss, how many times you turn, and how many times you get up in the middle of the night to pee?

Then there's a 21st century problem if I ever heard of one. "Orthosomnia" is a disorder where patients develop anxiety by beoming "preocupied with improving sleep data from wearables."

As a Fitbit wearer for 3+ years now, I understand that the info you get from your wearables can be anxiety-producing. I calmed down a lot when I decided that missing my step goal for a day or two wasn't going to kill me. As long as I made up for it over the course of the week, of course. (Hah!)

I think Fitbit also provides some sleep-related data, but I just ignore it. Restless sleep is just my lived experience. I don't need to over analyze it.

Then there's the problem of workaholic work cultures, like ones that expect employees to participate in global conference calls, where you're in yesterday USA talking to colleagues in tomorrowland Australia. And everybody's working off-hours to be on those calls. 

Anyway, I'll sleep better tonight knowing that I don't work for a company that wants to start keeping track of my sleep. 

Zzzzzz to that!