Eight Sleep—often called Silicon Valley’s favorite bed—is like a full-body Fitbit. It is a $3,050 mattress cover filled with sensors to monitor heart rate and body temperature. For people who pay $199 to $399 for an annual subscription, the cover will automatically heat and cool itself throughout the night to keep the owner at a sleep-optimal temperature. The add-on base (about $2,000) raises the angle of the bed to make reading more comfortable or to help stop snoring. Eight Sleep gently vibrates its users awake; it lulls them to sleep with “deep rest” meditations narrated by the wellness-science podcaster Andrew Huberman. To buy the Eight Sleep is to buy fully, with your whole body, into the idea that the future of sleep is technological.
On Monday, the future glitched. Eight Sleep’s features run on the AWS Cloud, so when one of Amazon Web Services’ data centers went offline at about 3 a.m. ET, the sleep system went haywire. Eight Sleep generally warms when the user is drifting off, then gets cooler as they enter deeper sleep. Santiago Lisa, a software engineer in Pittsburgh, told me he woke up because his bed was stuck in deep-sleep frigidity. He tried to warm it up using the Eight Sleep app, but no dice—the app was down. Then he tried the system’s manual buttons. No dice there, either—they also require the Cloud to function. Jordan Arnold, who works in the video-game industry in Washington State, told me that his girlfriend couldn’t sleep because her side of the bed was stuck at its highest temperature, 110 degrees Fahrenheit. She slept on the couch. Other poor souls, who had put their bed in a sitting position to read and were now stuck there, spent the night in the world’s most high-tech Barcalounger. A Jetsons vision of the 21st century did not include Mrs. Jetson stuck in an upright and locked position because her bed could not connect to a data center in Northern Virginia.
The disruption was short-lived: Eight Sleep’s products were up and running once AWS was. (The company is working to diversify its cloud setup, a spokesperson told me, and on Wednesday, it launched a backup mode that uses Bluetooth.) But that this fiasco happened at all is a sign of how much Americans’ desire to optimize their rest has grown—along with the market to sate that desire. We are being offered more and more ways to become, essentially, sleep cyborgs who depend on technology to enhance what should be a basic aspect of being alive. Those interested in “sleepmaxxing,” along with people who want to sleep better but don’t have a Silicon Valley–style term for it, have made sleep tech a $29.3 billion industry, by one measure. The value of the industry is expected to more than quadruple, to $135 billion, by 2034.
Shalini Paruthi, a physician who’s on the American Academy of Sleep Medicine committee for emerging technology, told me that she mostly sees her patients using sleep tech through meditation and bedtime-story platforms. Those with the Calm app can fall asleep to Harry Styles narrating a story called “Dream With Me,” Matthew McConaughey pontificating on “the mysteries of the universe,” or Travis Kelce’s mom talking about football. Devices have permeated all aspects of sleep, Paruthi said. Wearables such as the Oura Ring and Apple Watch track the wearer’s vitals. Red-light lamps aim to help people feel sleepier, noise machines play soundscapes as they drift off, and alarm clocks mimic sunlight to wake them up. I thought I was a little high-maintenance for using a fabric eye mask, but for north of $100, I could acquire a “smart” one that not only blocks light but also vibrates in sync with my heartbeat. For help falling asleep faster, people can buy a $350 “neurotech headband.” And those who aren’t ready to spend $3,000 on a sensor-filled mattress cover could instead opt for a $1,400 “dual zone climate control bed-making system”—a duvet connected to air hoses that pair with Alexa voice command. Notably, the Eight Sleep has aggregated much of the most popular consumer sleep equipment available into a single piece of technology.
Whether or not these gadgets actually help with sleep is an open question. Sleep-tracking devices do a “pretty good job of figuring out when a person fell asleep and when they woke up, based on their movement and heart rates,” Shalini said. (So does looking at your clock.) But they don’t “always do the best job in between.” Patients will come to her because their wearable says they got no REM sleep, which, she said, “quite frankly, would be impossible.” At the very least, these devices can encourage better sleep hygiene: One too many bad “sleep scores,” and a person might just start going to bed earlier and leaving their phone in another room.
For those with actual sleep disorders, cyborg sleep can be a very good thing. People who have extreme nightmares from PTSD can use NightWare, a prescription-only system that comes with a preprogrammed Apple Watch and detects if the wearer is having a nightmare. It will vibrate enough to stop the bad dream but not enough to wake the user. And for those with restless legs syndrome, there is Nidra, a cuff worn around the calves that helps alleviate RLS symptoms. Even Eight Sleep can be FSA/HSA-eligible with a doctor’s note explaining why it might help a preexisting health condition.
But in general, the more technology in a sleep routine, the more possible points of failure. Our bed might not connect to the cloud and remain stuck at an incline. We might open our phone to summon the soothing voice of Matthew McConaughey and instead be spirited away by Instagram. Technology, one of the main reasons we can’t sleep, has entered the last part of our life that is usually free from it. Before Eight Sleep announced its new offline mode, some Reddit users discussed “jailbreaking” their bed so that it could function without the AWS Cloud. A simpler hack might be to let our bodies do what they’re already primed to do. Even when his Eight Sleep malfunctioned on Monday and remained at frigid temperatures, Lisa told me, “I ended up sleeping. It was just cold.”