You slept fine. But then you checked your smartwatch. And Israel knows more.
A BBC Reel feature published on 26 June 2026 introduced millions of viewers to a word most had never encountered: orthosomnia. Coined in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine by researchers at Rush University Medical Center and Northwestern University, it describes a clinical anxiety in which patients become so fixated on their sleep tracker data that the tracking itself destroys the sleep it purports to measure. The patients were sleeping perfectly well. The numbers told them otherwise, and the numbers won.
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.5664/jcsm.6472]
A 2024 cross-sectional study of 523 adults estimated orthosomnia prevalence at between 3 and 14 per cent of the population, and found that those identified with the condition had higher insomnia scores than those without it. Researchers published a validated measurement instrument, the Bergen Orthosomnia Scale, in 2025. A clinical curiosity has matured into a measurable public health pattern. With more than a third of Americans now reporting they have used a wearable device to track their sleep, the question is no longer whether this technology influences behaviour but how, and at what cost.
[https://www.helse-bergen.no/nasjonal-kompetansetjeneste-for-sovnsykdommer-sovno/nyheter-2026/nytt-instrument-for-a-male-ortosomni/]
No country sits more squarely at the intersection of that question than Israel.
In 1975, a young sleep scientist returning from the United States founded Israel’s first sleep research laboratory at the Technion in Haifa. Over the subsequent five decades that laboratory grew into a discipline: its founder demonstrated the prevalence of breathing disorders during sleep, established their link to hypertension and cardiovascular disease, campaigned successfully for the abolition of early morning “zero hour” classes in Israeli schools, and helped bring daylight savings time to the country. The Technion Sleep Medicine Centre now operates four branches across Israel’s hospital network. Israel’s pioneer of sleep research did not merely study sleep. He built a national infrastructure for understanding it.
[https://md.technion.ac.il/giora-pillar/]
That infrastructure is now documenting something devastating. In June 2025, a landmark study by researchers at the Hebrew University and Hadassah Medical Centre, published in the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, became one of the first to systematically record how warfare affects civilian sleep. Drawing on data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and additional representative samples, the researchers found a 19 to 22 per cent rise in the prevalence of short sleep (under six hours nightly) and a 16 to 19 per cent increase in clinically significant insomnia among civilians during the conflict that followed 7 October 2023. These disruptions persisted six months into the war, long after reported psychological distress had begun to subside, suggesting that the damage to sleep outlasts the acute trauma that causes it.
[https://www.elsevier.es/en-revista-international-journal-clinical-health-psychology-355-pdf-download-S1697260025000547]
Nightly sirens, rocket fire, and the low hum of persistent threat do not produce the kind of sleep that a smartwatch can optimise. They produce the kind of sleep that barely arrives at all.
And yet it is Israeli innovators who are among the most determined to close the gap between measuring sleep and actually improving it. Itamar Medical, based in Caesarea, pioneered the WatchPAT home sleep apnea device, which measures peripheral arterial signals, heart rate, and oxygen levels via a fingertip probe, before its $538 million acquisition by ZOLL Medical. That was diagnosis. What followed was intervention. Kimba, a startup founded by a former IDF Oketz unit soldier severely wounded during the 2014 battle of Shuja’iyya, has raised $6.5 million to commercialise an AI powered scent therapy device that responds to biometric signals during sleep, releasing precisely timed olfactory cues through the limbic pathway without waking the sleeper. The founder’s service dog, also named Kimba, died from injuries sustained in that same engagement. The PTSD and chronic insomnia that followed drove him to build what he wished had existed. A preliminary study of 50 participants over 48 nights, conducted with a neuroscientist at the Hebrew University, showed that 86 per cent reported improved sleep on nights when the device was active. Further trials supervised by the Technion’s founding sleep researcher are now under way.
[https://www.itamar-medical.com/contact-us/]
The trajectory from that 1975 Technion laboratory to the Kimba bedside diffuser is not merely a startup story. It is the arc of a country that first learned to measure sleep, then watched its population lose it, and is now engineering its return.
The lesson from the Israeli experience is that technology which merely quantifies a problem it cannot solve is, at best, incomplete and, at worst, a source of harm in its own right. What the 2017 researchers called orthosomnia was a warning that the quantified self can become the anxious self. What the Hebrew University study documented in 2025 is the corollary: that in conditions of genuine physiological threat, no amount of tracking substitutes for intervention. The smartwatch on a sleepless wrist in Ashkelon is not lying. But it is not helping either.
Israel’s answer, characteristically, is to stop counting sheep and start building the shepherd.