OK, so I became one of those people: Claude diagnosed my sleep disorder.
Here's the story.
I'd been sleeping worse and worse since hitting my mid-30s. I've been averaging 5:30-5:45 a night for a couple years now, while in my 20s I was getting 7 hours a night. I figured it must be stress, sleep hygiene, perhaps just aging--or maybe I'm one of those freaks of nature who doesn't actually need much sleep.
Eventually I bought an Oura ring and started tracking sleep, figuring "what gets measured gets optimized." But it didn't optimize anything, it mostly just showed me high-resolution charts that, yeah, my sleep sucks. It never pointed out anything obviously wrong other than how little I was sleeping.
Nothing seemed to help. Phone in another room, eye mask, blackout curtains, white noise machine, nothing seemed to help. My body just didn't want to sleep more than 6 hours a night.
Eventually I decided: fuck it. I'm pretty productive, maybe this is all I need. People say humans need 7-9 hours a night, but that's averages right? I'm probably just an outlier.
I stopped worrying about it.
Later I mentioned to an acquaintance that I was tired since I had woken up multiples times in the night.
They said: multiple times? That's really weird. You shouldn't be waking up multiple times in the night at your age.
Weird? That's not weird.
Is that weird?
That evening I asked Claude: is it weird for an in-shape mid-30s male to be waking up multiple times a night?
Answer: yes, that is weird. If you aren't sleeping enough and waking up multiple times a night, that usually means something is wrong. You should look into getting a sleep study.
I asked it what a sleep study measures, and if any of that data already lived in my Oura ring. Sure enough, some of it did--not sleep study grade, but enough for a first cut.
So I busted out Claude Code, since I would want Claude to have maximum access to tools for this. I had it figure out how to pull from the Oura API (using personal access tokens, ask your Claude for instructions) and pull down all of my sleep data. I then had it use Python to statistically analyze everything (heart rate, SpO2, wake events, sleep stages), test multiple hypotheses, and generate a dashboard full of charts, while explaining everything it was doing so I could follow along.
After 30 minutes of slicing and dicing, a hypothesis emerged: UARS, upper-airway resistance syndrome, a mild cousin of sleep apnea.
No way. Sleep apnea?
I don't snore, I'm not overweight. No way I have sleep apnea. This is the first time I've ever heard this.
Claude walked me through it. UARS is milder than full-blown sleep apnea. In UARS, your airway doesn't collapse, it just narrows, particularly in REM sleep when the muscles in your throat relax. This causes your oxygen to gradually drift down over the course of REM sleep, until your brain yanks you awake before it becomes a full apnea. In your 20s the muscle tone in your throat keeps your airway open, but as you age that tone slackens, which can trigger this effect, fragmenting your sleep.
It looks exactly like this: waking up disproportionately during REM sleep multiple times a night. That actually tracked; I realized that almost every time I woke up in the middle of the night, it was out of a dream.
Claude was clear that the Oura ring data was not dispositive, because it wasn't able to measure breathing disruptions per hour (RDI), which you'd get in a sleep study. Do a sleep study, get the RDI number, and then we'll have our smoking gun.
It pointed me to an FDA-approved at-home sleep study device (with finger probe and chest sensor) called WatchPAT for $200. After one night of recording, I got the results back to the next day:
Mild sleep apnea, likely UARS. Dammit Claude. Nicely done.
Here's the takeaway, and why I'm posting this: I'm a textbook "no way it's me" case. UARS often shows up in healthy, normal weight people who don't fit the apnea stereotype, and often gets missed for that reason.
It's easy to attribute poor sleep to insomnia or anxiety or stress, and there's an infinite supply of influencers who will pitch you reasons to feel like your sleep ritual is the problem. If you just got that red light glasses, or the blackout curtains, or took that sleeping peptide, maybe you'd be able to fix your sleep.
Roughly 10-15% of adults have some form of sleep apnea, and vast majority of them (80% ) are undiagnosed. If this might be you, run your fitness tracker data through your neighborhood frontier LLM. You'll thank yourself later.