My Sleep Score Is 93. So Why Do I Feel So Crappy

I woke up feeling groggy and wishing I could go back to bed. Then I glanced at my watch. It said my sleep score was 93. So why do I feel so crappy?

Many seniors have difficulty sleeping. I thought I did, too. Between bathroom trips and repositioning myself constantly because some body part hurts, it seemed like I wasn’t getting any sleep.

Then I started wearing my watch to bed. The health app has been giving me pretty good sleep scores. Something seemed amiss. So I wondered just what the watch was tracking. Turns out it just tracks sleep duration and bedtime consistency, and interruptions which tracks the quality and duration of moments you spent awake or woke up during the night. 

created by ChatGPT 9/26/26

I wondered what it meant by quality of movements. Turns out short, brief isolated movements like tossing and turning, readjusting the pillow and still register as sleep, whereas prolonged movements, when your wrist is moving constantly for over a minute, indicate you have awakened.

But there’s a catch. When I can’t sleep, I read a Kindle book on my iPad. Since I turn the pages with my dominant hand and wear my watch on the other wrist, I wondered if my watch thought I was sleeping through the whole thing.

Apparently not. I checked a night when I had read for almost two hours, and somehow it knew I was awake. So much for fooling my watch.

On the one hand, it’s consoling to have information about my sleep. I know last week I averaged 7 hours 30 minutes sleep.  That’s more than I would have guessed. I figured between bathroom trips, cat interruptions, and hubby’s CPAP noise I must have been awake half the time.

It also lets me know I didn’t have any breathing disturbances, good to know since on the few occasions when I snore at night hubby wants me to get tested for sleep apnea.

It’s also curious that the ‘interruptions’ seem erratic. You’d think my bladder would have a schedule. Apparently, it prefers spontaneity. But looking at the orange interruptions bands they are scattered haphazardly across the sleep time spectrum.

So I guess the sleep statistics are both a blessing and a curse.

On the blessings side, maybe I can stop lying awake worrying that I’m not getting enough sleep. Those nights when my brain ruminates: I can’t get back to sleep. Even breathing exercises aren’t working. I’ll be exhausted tomorrow. How long have I been awake. It seems like hours. Of course, worrying about not sleeping is an excellent way to make sure you don’t.

When I asked Dr. Google the average times I should spend in each sleep phase, my average awake time is – well – average. Apparently I am getting enough sleep.

On the curse side, it gives me another set of numbers to obsess about. What if my average drops to seven hours? What if my sleep score suddenly plummets? What did I do that’s keeping me awake?

And just when I think I’m sleeping great—BAM! I have a fitful night and wake up with a sleep score of 74.

Of course, now I have to figure out what I did wrong. What was different about last night? Did I eat something strange? Ohhhh. I just remembered. I had half a cup of regular coffee after 6 p.m. I didn't think a few sips of coffee could do that much damage. Maybe I have to rethink it.

Finally, there’s another problem. Complaining about sleep is a perfectly good topic of conversation with friends my age. If I have good sleep scores, what am I supposed to contribute now?

“My sleep score was 93 last night.”

That ought to make me popular.

Especially when I follow it with, “But I still feel crappy.”