“Insomnia Identity”

“Insomnia Identity” sounds a bit like a cult:

In those studies, he found that 37 percent of participants who identified themselves as having insomnia were actually "normal" sleepers as defined by the respective study researchers.

That has consequences: he writes that "perceived sleep disturbance poses a health risk, even when accompanied by good sleep." And according to Lichstein, those people are at a greater risk of things like fatigue, hypertension, self-stigma, depression, suicidal ideation and anxiety -- all because they think they're bad sleepers.

Or as Alex Fradera writes in a piece about the findings in the British Psychological Society research digest, "these 'complaining good sleepers' can have as high impairment in terms of daily fatigue, anxiety and depression as those suffering under a clinical deficit of sleep."