Are you ready for this sleep experiment?
Sleep-tech, the latest bastion for tech’s taking
In our household, I’m renowned for my ability to sleep soundly. I have slept through earthquakes and building fires, as unmovable and unshakable as Mount Olympus. In the past years, I have often been nonplussed by co-workers trying to fill gaps in work meetings with the tiresomely un-profound question, “What keeps you up at night?”. To which my answer has always been, “Nothing”. Nothing keeps me up at night. In 2019, that made me an uncaring tech employee; in 2021, I’m a superhero.
Earlier this year, my boyfriend, worn down by intermittent bouts of sleeplessness, decided that he finally needed to rest. A self-admitted workaholic, his pride and faith in the fashionable dictum of the last decade — “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” — had been shaken by the year 2020. In the era of great reset when all of us had been forced to take a closer look at life locked down in homes, he was emerging with his own big realization.
“I can’t run on this little sleep anymore. I need to fix this”, he proclaimed one morning, rising from bed after yet another night of tossing, turning, giving up and scrolling through yards of Twitter feed at four am.
Like a good American citizen that he is, he set out to find a capitalistic solution to his sleep problems which one may argue stem from a modern, capitalistic lifestyle itself. He ordered a sound machine that bellows cosmic microwave background instead of the advertised crashing ocean waves; a 20-pound buckwheat pillow and a 20-pound weighted blanket that turns my morning bed-making routine into a workout; and the most expensive purchase of all: a smart mattress with temperature control and advanced sleep tracking by one of the many startups operating in the latest domain conquest by Silicon Valley — sleep tech.
He joins a society that seems to have come full circle with its relationship to sleep. In previous centuries, poets of all stature — William Shakespeare, John Keats, James Joyce penned odes to deep, sweet sleep, a treasured and celebrated part of human life — until it wasn’t. When I entered the workforce in 2009, sleep had already become an impediment to productivity, a cumbersome bodily weakness that could be minimized with Starbucks and Red Bulls. A full night’s rest was deemed for the weak. People drew silent, inverse correlations between success and amount of sleep. Internet discussion threads undertook serious investigations into the number of hours spent eyes-wide-shut by the likes of Obama and Gates.
Then what has changed in 2021? Americans are unarguably overworked, underslept and desperately in need of rest. The daily demands on life during a full-blown global crisis have left us further exhausted. The hustle culture has lost its allure. Is Pandemic burnout the catalyst for this new deep-sleep craving hunger? Or, are we simply making a beeline to enroll ourselves into yet another one of technology’s large-scale social experiments built upon the already elevated idea of quantified self?
Having built technologies for every moment of our attentive waking state, sleep is the last bastion for tech’s taking. After all, a third of our lives are spent sleeping — that is a significant part of the human mind, body and time remaining unquantified and unmonetized. Mattress companies, meditation apps and now wearables are all selling sleep-as-a-service. For an average work-obsessed American, the promise of better sleep to boost productivity is the real motivation and the ultimate dream. For investor-backed startups, every new dream is a path to profitability.
On a cool Saturday morning, the smart sleep tracking mattress arrived in our lobby. The gargantuan packaging box stood tall, glaring at me as if already challenging my self-confidence as a sound sleeper. “You think you sleep all that well, huh?”, it seemed to whisper. My mattress was no longer foam and springs; it was artificially intelligent. It was now a composition of matter, electrons, wires, algorithms and conceptual models.
In interfacing with the mattress, I was never sure if it was adjusting to my needs or I to its design. It required behavior modification and new decisions. I could choose my body’s optimal temperature and create the microclimate I need to get my best sleep. As appealing as that sounds, the privilege of choice soon turned into the fatigue of decision-making. I carried a constant feeling of failure at not being able to give a numeric expression to my body’s temperature proclivity. Into the bargain, detailed REM and non-REM charts now occupied my morning brain space otherwise reserved for idle thoughts like recollecting previous night’s curious dreams. As for my boyfriend, the reports told him what he already knew — he slept poorly. Like a nagging relative that is quick to make a well-too-familiar observation about your weight but offers no further utility, the numbers didn’t equate to an action plan.
At the end of the 100-day trial period, I decided to return to the comfort of our analog mattress and the system of blankets and sheets to create the microclimate I needed at night. In a culture that legitimizes all emerging technologies and glorifies early tech adopters, I opted out of being an anxious guinea pig for this sleep experiment. My boyfriend’s search for sleep fitness was eventually met in simple acts of regularities, better bedtime habits and a reframed relationship to sleep. Sleep, it turns out, is not a problem to be solved, but an experience of existence to be relished. “Sleep, the main course in life’s feast, and the most nourishing”, wrote William Shakespeare.
As far as the future of high-tech wearables goes, I remain optimistic. I wear an FDA-approved glucose monitor on my arm. Diabetes runs in my family on both sides; it’s a rogue, recessive gene we can’t seem to get rid of. Consulting my glucose levels in real-time has alleviated my fear of insidious sugar spikes and improved my contentious relationship with food. In comparison, sleep-tech devices delivering nascent medical science in consultation with researchers are not required to apply the same rigor to clinical trials. In our free-market economy, the responsibility to decide on the feasibility of new technologies has been pushed toward consumers. We vote every day with our attention or our dollars. We are asked to blindly celebrate the future without asking the hard questions. What does it mean to have a mattress that will rate you on your sleep? What does it mean to make stilted choices about our biology? How will this technology change our psychology and our society? How will it change us?
P.S.: For those looking to reclaim rest away from devices, check out an ex co-worker’s upcoming book: The Rest Trials: What I Learned From a Year of Soundbaths, Siestas, and Other Experiments in Slowing Down. If you’re interested in being part of the research process, she would love to hear your story. Sign up to be included.
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