Sleep is serious business for Claire McCormack, a self-described “elder Millennial.” If she doesn’t get a solid six to eight hours, she feels the aftermath acutely — “It’s like a truck ran me over,” she says, adding that the fallout from a bad night has intensified as she’s gotten older. The trouble is, drifting off isn’t always easy. “Some people hit the pillow and they go right to sleep. I am not like that,” she says. “It’s 5,000 words a minute going through my head.”
So McCormack, a senior editor at Beauty Independent, a trade publication that covers the beauty and wellness industries, has curated an extensive bedtime routine featuring no fewer than nine products that she believes help her fall asleep fast — and more importantly, stay asleep.
10 years ago, getting a good night’s sleep was mainly a matter of purchasing the right mattress. Now, the market is flooded with products — creams, spa treatments, and techy gadgets included — all claiming to get you to bed faster, and for longer. According to consumer trends platform Spate, Google searches for sleep aids like grounding sheets (plug-in bedding that purports to sync users with the Earth’s natural electrical energy for a more restful night) and the “Sleepy Girl Mocktail” (a before-bed drink popularized on TikTok earlier this year) have surged approximately 486 percent and 2,079 percent year-over-year, respectively. And monthly Google queries for magnesium supplements, said to help with insomnia, averaged 3.3 million from March 2023 to March 2024, making it the ingestible supplement with the most significant increase in searches.
As instinctive as sleep is, the demands (and conveniences) of contemporary culture — stressful jobs and endless on-screen entertainment, for example — are making it harder to get rest. It’s a phenomenon that’s not lost on experts like Ankit Parekh, director of Mount Sinai’s Sleep and Circadian Analysis Group. “Not getting enough quality sleep is definitely an epidemic,” he says. As sleep becomes harder to attain, a new class of luxury “sleep wellness” products is helping us relearn the long-lost art of rest — and in the process, turning bedtime into an experience that’s anything but restful.
McCormack’s multi-step sleep regimen starts with her tongue scraper (“I cannot go to bed unless I scrape my tongue,” she says). Then come the supplements: Moon Juice’s Magnesi-Om powder, the main ingredient in the aforementioned “Sleepy Girl Mocktail”; and cannabinol (CBN) gummies from Charlotte’s Web. Sometimes, McCormack will slather on Glow Botanica’s magnesium body lotion, which the brand says is “designed to promote relaxation and ensure peaceful sleep.” She also finds that slipping on a nice pair of pajamas (she prefers those by Eberjay) helps her wind down for the night. McCormack also wields a Vital Red Light — “to calm my brain down,” she says — and a white noise machine. The finishing touch? A sleep mask, which she says is “essential,” and a pair of standard-issue ear plugs (“I have not gone fancy yet”). That’s not all. McCormack is also building something of a sleep wishlist. On it currently: AuraForm’s grounding sheets, Eight Sleep’s Pod 4, a sleep-tracking mattress cover that can cool and elevate your bed; and the sleep therapy program at Lanserhof, an ultra-luxurious medical spa in Germany.
None of it comes cheap. A 4.2 ounce jar of Moon Juice’s magnesium powder will set you back $44; Eight Sleep’s high-tech Pod 4 is $4,049; a minimum seven-night stay at Lanserhof’s flagship Sylt location starts at around €5,500.
Still, consumers like McCormack are more than willing to invest. Why is sleep so important, and why now more than ever?
From Hustle Culture to Rest Culture
“The easier question is, what aspects of our health does sleep not impact?” says neurologist and sleep specialist Chris Winter. Nevertheless, he rattles off an incomplete list of sleep's key functions: “It supports our cardiovascular system, it helps us properly function cognitively, it has massive effects on mood and our metabolism.”
Sleep has always been integral to our overall health, but it hasn’t always been top-of-mind. Think back to the mid-2010s, when hustle culture abounded. Busy schedules were bragging rights. Sleep was for the dead. Eventually, this “rise-and-grind” mentality caught up to us. Enter: COVID-19. As companies adopted remote work, employees began enjoying a slew of benefits, one of them being the ability to hit snooze in lieu of long, unproductive commutes. The freedom to sleep in and take breaks helped many of us realize just how burnt out we were. Hustle culture was no longer cool — preserving our physical and mental health became a pressing concern as we witnessed the devastating effects of the pandemic.
Chatter about sleep’s effect on the immune system and vaccine efficacy became a hot topic during the pandemic, heightening public awareness of what’s at stake when we don’t rest. Consumers began to seek out sleep products and simultaneously, companies capitalized on our concern. Not too long ago, we thought about sleep “like eye color,” Winter says. “My eyes are green, I can’t do anything about that.” Now, sleep is a “modifiable variable,” he says, something consumers can hone and optimize via gadgets, topicals, ingestibles, and even vacations (according to The New York Times, “sleep tourism” is the travel industry’s next big trend).
Sleep as Sport
Eight Sleep is one such leader of the sleep optimization movement. Founded in 2014, the company’s specialty is the aforementioned Pod 4, a mattress cover that can cool down and heat up your mattress, as well as adjust its foot and head elevation. The Pod’s built-in sensors also track your sleep: The mattress cover connects to an accompanying app where users can see metrics like what time they fell asleep, when they woke up during the night, and the amount of REM sleep they got. Even more impressive, the Pod 4 can sense when you’re snoring and will automatically elevate your head, a function we can only assume is a godsend for mixed-snoring couples.
Eight Sleep doesn’t consider itself a traditional bedding company, or even a tech company. Instead, it bills itself as a “sleep fitness” brand. Alexandra Zatarain, Eight Sleep co-founder and vice president of marketing and branding, elaborates on the term: “Just like physical fitness, sleep is a journey; it's something you have to work on. It's not that you're naturally bad at sleep — you can measure it; you can optimize it.”
Co-founder and CEO Matteo Franceschetti views sleep fitness as a natural evolution of the wellness trend cycle. “First people started focusing on nutrition. Then they got into fitness, and now they’re into sleep,” he says. “If you go back 15, 20 years ago, there were entrepreneurs saying, ‘Oh, I sleep only three, four hours a night because I'm strong. I don't need to sleep longer.’ Now, sleep deprivation is the new smoking.”
Some of those entrepreneurs are now Eight Sleep fans. Among the brand’s powerful proponents are Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Kernel’s Bryan Johnson, best known for his efforts to biohack his way to a younger “biological age.”
Under Eight Sleep’s sleep fitness model, bedtime morphs into another form of productivity. You’re no longer resting for rest’s sake — your body is physically still, but it’s being measured and tracked so it can become better.
The rest-productivity paradox is inherent in countless other sleep wellness offerings on the market. The Oura Ring, a wearable sleep and physical activity tracker, offers users a nightly “sleep score” (85 to 100 is “optimal,” according to Oura’s website) based on measurements like your resting heart rate and body temperature. Somnee, an electronic headband, uses transcranial electrical stimulation to increase sleep duration “by over 30 minutes” and reduce tossing and turning “by a third,” according to the brand’s website. BYNACHT, a beauty brand, touts sleep as a path to better-looking skin — the brand’s “nocturnal skincare formulas” take advantage of the skin’s nighttime renewal process (dermatologist Ellen Marmur explains that at night, our bodies divert more resources towards skin regeneration and digestion compared to our waking hours).
Productivity is even built into a new genre of sleep experiences offered by spas and wellness centers marketing sleep not as a passive act, but as an acquireable skill akin to lifting weights or speaking a new language. In June, Equinox Hotels launched its inaugural Global Sleep Symposium, a two-day event promising a “complete transformation to optimal sleep.” And Canyon Ranch offers a sleep and insomnia retreat centered on “mastering great sleep.”
To Buy or Not to Buy
Clever marketing has certainly contributed to the buzz surrounding these sleep wellness products, but that’s not to say they don’t have genuine benefits. Before Aniket Borkar invested in the Eight Sleep Pod 3 (the Pod 4’s predecessor), he was getting an average of four to five hours of sleep a night. “Back in high school, I started getting pretty bad insomnia,” he says. “It took me an hour or two to fall asleep. Moving through college, I found that my sleep got even worse — I'd wake up multiple times at night, just tossing and turning. When I started working, it really started to become an issue.”
Borkar, an engineer at a NVIDIA, spends about 80 hours on the job each week. He knows his demanding schedule doesn’t help his insomnia: “Work stress really gets my mind racing as soon as I get into bed,” he says. But when Borkar began using Eight Sleep’s Pod 3 last August, he noticed a near-immediate improvement in his sleep. “I stopped waking up in the middle of the night. It was easy to fall asleep because [the Pod 3] figures out what time you usually go to sleep and it starts to adjust the temperatures in your bed, before you get into bed.”
Parekh says that generally, the research behind sleep tracking devices isn’t as robust as the medical community would like to see. “In our experience, these devices are good at telling you when you were asleep versus awake, and not so much about what kind of sleep [light, deep, or REM] you’re getting,” he says of gadgets like the Eight Sleep. As for magnesium supplements, Parekh is of the same opinion: “They are still relatively new and not much is known about their efficacy. The jury is still out on them as to whether they can have an effect or not.”
But if users like Borkar are benefitting, they have real value all the same. To both Parekh and Winter, anything — whether it be a tracker, supplement, or cream — that helps people pay more attention to their sleep can have a positive impact. As Winter puts it: “If you made a Lance Armstrong LiveStrong band that said ‘SleepStrong’ and put it on people's wrist, I'll bet their sleep improves just because it's a reminder that ‘Oh yeah, I probably should go to bed early and make sure my bedroom is nice and dark and cool.’”
Mark Kovaks, vice president of health and performance at Canyon Ranch, predicts that the next decade will see a slew of new consumer sleep trends emerge. The temperature and scent of our bedrooms can be optimized for a better night. Our “pre-sleep” and “post-sleep” routines will become new areas of focus. Kovaks points out that our “pre-awakening schedules” — “waking during the right sleep stages,” he says — are ripe for improvement, too.
That’s Great — But It’s Not For Everyone
“I have the privilege of choosing to go to bed at night,” Winter says. “If you work late and you've got kids and they've got homework and you’ve got to cook for them and clean up, get ready for the next day, pack lunches, maybe even relax yourself, which everybody's entitled to do, you can see how time for sleep can easily get squeezed.”
So while the innovations on the horizon are good news for those with the means to afford them, they’re less promising for the widening sleep gap, a disparity between the amount of sleep that wealthy and poor folks get on average. In 2021, the Washington Post reported that 35.2 percent of people earning below the poverty level sleep less than six hours in a 24-hour period, compared to 27.7 percent of those earning more than four times the poverty level. Race also plays into the sleep divide: According to the Post, Black people in the U.S. are five times as likely to sleep for shorter periods, putting them at higher risk of maladies linked to chronic sleep loss, like hypertension and diabetes, compared to their white counterparts.
Set against the stark background of America’s socioeconomic divide, the proliferation of luxurious sleep getaways and techy gadgets can seem frivolous. While some are perfecting their before-bed routines, others are working graveyard shifts. It’s a cynical outlook, sure, but doctors like Winter are well-acquainted with the reality that some sleep problems can’t be helped by a product, no matter how affordable or expensive.
Scenarios like these keep Winter up at night. “They’re some of the more difficult conversations I have in my clinic. I'm like, ‘God dammit, you cannot work two jobs. You're getting off at midnight. You’ve got to be up at 4:30 to get to your next job. You can't do this,’” he says. Winter knows that often, his patients won’t take his advice. “They say, ‘Well, why don't you pay my mortgage?’ I don't have an answer for that.”
