I read a review by Linda Codega (the reporter who broke the Dungeons and Dragons/Wizards of the Coast OGL news back in January) the other day. They were covering Pokémon Sleep, the latest app in Nintendo’s continued pursuit of becoming a lifestyle company. The game is fairly simple, in that it monitors your sleep habits (by being open on your phone, which you’ve left facedown on top of your bed) and scores you based on how much you moved around in your sleep, how long you slept, and who knows what other data. Based on your score, you get the chance to power up your Pokémon, capture new Pokémon (via taking pictures), and advance in the game. It’s fairly simple and straight-forward and, to me at least, does not seem terribly appealing. I sleep pretty poorly, though, so maybe I’m just not interested in a game I won’t be good at. That said, what has me thinking about this fairly bland game days later is what Codega muses on in the latter portion of their article. If this app is the last thing we think about before we go to bed and the first thing we think about when we wake up, what does that do to us as Humans? What are going to be the long-term consequences of the continued gamification of life, as we turn sleep from something meant to prepare us for another day into another form of entertainment? They end the review without coming to a conclusion, saying they would need more than one night of using the yet-unreleased app to really dive into the cultural implications, but I realized that this is something I’ve already done to myself and have been doing for years now.

I’ve got sleep apnea. Probably genetic, with some complications from weight, but I’m pretty sure some of my relatives on my dad’s side of the family have it as well, so I’ll likely never be entire rid of it. As a result, I’ve got one of those CPAP machines and an associated app for reading and interpreting the data the machine collects. The way it interprets and then presents this data is via various ratings, culminating in a total score out of 100. Since I’ve been using this for years and doing my best to actually use the medical devices prescribed to me in a healthy and helpful way, I spent most of my first six months using my machine trying to get consistent full scores. I also spent a bunch of time figuring out what the bounds of the scoring were, so I’d know what would or would not deduct points. I literally gamified my medical-device-assisted sleep. Sure, there’s no reward system in the app and it’s not actually entertaining, but I also update a barely-read blog every day. I’m not motivated by external rewards and validation, I’m motivated by the satisfaction of setting a goal and acheiving it, so I figured out how to get a good grade in sleep and then proved I could do it pretty much any time I wanted.

In more recent years, along with monitoring my sleep score, I’ve also developed a bad habit of turning to my phone immediately when I wake up. It started innocuously enough, with one of those programs that forces you to solve math problems in order to turn off your alarm. I had been having some issues with actually waking up in the morning (a result of my horrible lack of sleep at the start of 2021 and my struggles to get back a normal pattern that have slowly diminshed over the two and a half years since then), so I figured some math or something would be a good way to help push me to consciousness most mornings. When that stopped working (because I got really good at doing math without waking up), I used Google Routines to give myself enough noise in the mornings that I couldn’t go back to sleep. Music, a weather report, some reminders, a random poem off the internet, and then a loud podcast. It was a pretty effective routine that fell apart the instant I stopped using Spotify since none of the alternatives I looked at worked with google routines. Which means now I pretty much just open up Twitter or Discord first thing in the morning and sear my brain awake with blue light.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t a healthy thing. I used to get something similar, but probably more healthy, with one of those daylight alarm clocks that wakes you up by slowly getting brighter and brighter to mimic the sunrise. That stopped working, eventually, for the same reason the math did (I got very good at turning it off in my sleep the instant it started to brighten up), but it was a much more effective means of waking myself up than blasting the horribleness that is twitter (or whatever it’s called now) into my eyes and brain first thing in the morning. I’ve tried to just listen to my alarm or to find something enriching to think about, but I keep just falling back asleep again. Twitter might be toxic, but it definitely wakes me up enough that I don’t immediately fall asleep the instant I put my phone aside. I’m still struggling with the “getting up and moving around” part that is supposed to come after I don’t go back to sleep, though. I think some of that will be a bit easier to manage when I’m no longer chronically short on sleep, but I’ve got no idea when I’ll manage that particular feat…

Ideally, I’d like to get through my morning routine without my phone. I kind of hate the thing, even if I’m addicted to it. I just can’t do most of my morning stuff without my phone, since my exercise bike requires a device connected via bluetooth to use it at all, and the rest of my morning routine needs my morning playlist so I can keep track of time. I can’t really set it aside these days, unless I invested in another device (which defeats the point entirely) or a bunch of systems in my living space that I can’t afford or can’t install because I don’t own my living space. Someday, I’ll get all of that stuff sorted out. A connected sound system so I can play my music throughout my entire house (or just in specific rooms) and an app-capable large screen of some kind that I can use to play my podcasts or whatever while I ride my exercise bike and do my stretches. That will me my first major home investment meant purely for my own enjoyment when I eventually buy a house of some kind. It’ll be great. And maybe I could even figure out a way to create a day/night cycle in my bedroom as my alarm without needing to get it wired to a bunch of smart devices (since I refuse to allow Google or Amazon into my home like that). It would be really cool.

Until then, though, I guess I’m stuck with my gamified sleep and the way that it has pretty much destroyed the sanctity of my sleeping time. Nowadays, I don’t really sleep so much as attempt to aim for a high score or at least mitigate a very low score by manipulating the systems involved in measuring the supposed quality of my sleep, despite some of my most restful evenings in the past two years being ones that did not score very well. All of this disrespect for my sleep has grown from the gamification I’ve built around it myself. I used to just wake up to an alarm. I had a pretty standard routine of going to sleep when I felt tired, waking up to my alarm, taking some time to slowly come to full consciousness, and then moving on with my day. All of that is gone now, as I pursue perfect sleep and attempt to manipualte my mind and body into perfect sleep habits. It really kinda sucks.