Earlier this year, my partner was woken by the sounds of a woman being kidnapped. It was, in fact, just me, squirming beneath a strip of black “mouth tape” I had bought in the hope of a better night’s sleep. My nose had blocked overnight – despite the magnetic nose tape I’d also been recommended by a “sleep scientist” on TikTok – and I was no longer able to breathe. Nor, for that matter, see or hear, since my eyes were covered by a 3D blackout mask and my ears plugged with silicone. I had essentially bound and gagged myself in the name of “sleepmaxxing,” yet another wellness trend about “engineering” the perfect night’s rest, as part of our increasing cultural obsession with self-optimisation.
Sleep, one of life’s simplest and most fundamental requirements, has become a performance metric. It no longer suffices to tally up how many hours you slept; what matters is how perfect your “sleep cycles” were, how many minutes of REM (the dreaming stage) you clocked up and how “efficient” your night was. Did you even sleep at all if you don’t have the data to prove it?
“Sleep scores” from expensive wearable health trackers that monitor your heart rate and skin temperature are now casually swapped at dinner parties alongside recommendations for “smart” mattresses and Dyson purifier fans. You can even buy smart headbands to measure your nightly brain activity and smart beds that count your “bed rebalances” and come with an AI sleep coach. Such lunacy is arguably all the fault of Matthew Walker, a British neuroscience professor whose best-selling 2017 book Why We Sleep turned him into one of the most ubiquitous guests on the “pod bro” circuit, including twice on The Diary of a CEO. He now has his own podcast, with an episode on “optimising” your sleep, sponsored by a brand offering a “personalised biometric platform that analyses your blood and your DNA”.
I stopped short of ordering an Oura Ring after a friend recently ruined a night at the pub by showing us how terrible her score was after just one glass of wine. We all felt far too anxious to order our second. But I suspect quite a few millennials breathed a deep sigh of relief this morning to see their sleep scores boosted by the clocks going back. Sales of Oura’s smart ring rose by 57 per cent last year, and Oura is now valued at over £8bn, with millennials and Gen X its core market. Meanwhile, Whoop is valued at over £7.5bn, with its bracelet sales surging by 194 per cent.
According to a 2024 YouGov survey, one in five Britons track their sleep. Granted, sleep underpins all physical and cognitive health, so it’s important to care about it, but the anxiety that comes with monitoring sleep so minutely has spawned the term “orthosomnia”, after researchers found more patients sought treatment for insomnia because their trackers said they weren’t sleeping enough. The internet laughed at Steven Bartlett for claiming three glasses of wine had “ruined” three days of his life, but I am sure, right now, some poor biotracked millennial in north London is saying exactly the same thing.
Perfect rest has become a key part of today’s quiet luxury aesthetic. Not only are health gadgets expensive – Oura’s smart rings start from £399, Whoop memberships from £169 per year – but they suggest their owners have the time and means to think about, and invest in, the maintenance (and optimisation) of the self.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that night nannies, who look after newborns overnight so their parents can sleep, have grown in popularity, despite costing up to £300 a night. Some start-ups even offer them as a perk – presumably so they don’t have to share their star employees with a baby. Of course, sleep deprivation among new mothers is an important public health issue and can have serious consequences, but it speaks to our cultural moment that “Gift of Sleep” vouchers for night nannies, sometimes bought for baby showers, even exist at all.
Silicon Valley used to worship the people who barely slept. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer described four-hour nights to cope with a 130-hour work week at Google. But since longevity science has become the elite’s new religion, that mood has shifted. Mark Zuckerberg gets his eight hours through a “very instrumented” routine that includes an Oura ring and a smart mattress. The world’s most famous biohacker, Bryan Johnson, who reportedly spends just under £1.5m annually on his longevity routine, recommends spending between seven and nine hours asleep every single night. Yet for the majority of people who work eight hours a day, require a long commute, cook, clean, look after a family and try to squeeze in essentials such as exercise, the idea of spending nine hours in bed each weeknight is laughable.
Anything more than nine hours, however, is frowned upon as idle. In today’s glorified hustle culture – which is what wrecked our sleep to begin with – too much rest suggests a lack of ambition. What’s more, in a world in which there are more billionaires than ever, the most coveted luxuries are the ones money can’t buy. Discipline, from how much you eat to how much you sleep, is a mark of distinction. Perfect sleep, like the perfect body, has become the ultimate status symbol.