How do sleep studies provide useful data when they’re taking you out of your normal routine to a strange place, bed, and hooked up to things?

Question

Wouldn’t you be basically guaranteed to sleep poorly?

I know just being in a hotel I wake up and flop around all night. Being observed and tested seems telling me that would just make it worse.

In: Biology

Answer 1

The fact that a person may have a poor night’s sleep in a foreign bed while being monitored actually helps – they want to find out problems, so having you in a situation where you are unlikely to have a randomly good night’s sleep is a good thing.

And the things they are looking for aren’t just ‘I had trouble falling asleep’. The are looking for how well you breathe while asleep, whether you do go through all the proper stages of sleep. These show up whether you are fully comfortable or not.