How deep sleep became a status symbol

We have now entered the era of “sleep optimisation”. While dream readings and interpretations have been around since ancient times, the current buzz around rest is less spiritual as it is analytical. 

From TikTok videos promising you 34 per cent more deep sleep each night through “biohacking” methods to viral “sleepy girl” mocktail recipes and people bragging about their “high quality” sleep ratio online, optimising your sleep has become one of the hottest wellness trends of this past year. Naturally, that means there’s now a plethora of targeted products available to help you achieve a new coveted ratio of deep rest. Weighted sleep masks are selling out online and sleep tech trackers like the Oura Ring are flying off shelves. The technology itself isn’t new (Oura launched in 2015 and Fitbit brought out a sleep analysis feature in 2022) but it has transcended the CEO circles that it initially gained popularity. Now, it’s not just the tech bros or team rise-and-grind tracking every moment of their nightly sleep.

Michelle Siman, the creator and host of the wellness podcast Lemon Water, started tracking her sleep in January this year using Whoop. Within the first month, she said her sleep score improved by seven per cent. Whoop measures your sleep performance by tracking all four stages of sleep – slow wave sleep (deep), REM, light, and awake – and monitoring your sleep consistency and respiratory rate. It is worth noting that a recent study found that sleep-tracking tech can provide inaccurate data and lead people to develop orthosomnia, a preoccupation with improving wearable sleep data (yes, there’s a medical term for that). And, according to Sleep Foundation, there are no exact guidelines for the amount of deep sleep a person needs. It’s also something that your brain “self-optimises” naturally, cycling through each sleep stage four to six times each night.

We can gladly bid farewell to the #girlboss mentality of wearing sleeplessness as a badge of honour, but our new-found obsession with “sleep performance” is hyper-individualising a collective issue. In a time where the average person in the US gets less than seven hours sleep a night, celebrities are bragging about sleeping 14 hours a night. This brings to light the importance of sleep equity, says Troxel. Considering your income bracket and the neighbourhood you live in can all influence your sleep health (as well of course, other factors like whether you have young children or are experiencing mental health struggles), Troxel says we should be devoting resources to make good quality sleep accessible for everyone – not treating sleep as an individual wellness trend. “Sleep health isn’t just for those who can afford it.”

While there’s no denying that sleep quality is an important factor for our overall health, the path of “effortfully striving for sleep” can become a rabbit hole for people suffering from insomnia. “Sleep is not something that you can grit your teeth and make yourself do,” says Troxel. “Our brains need to feel that the world is safe and secure, not that bedtime is the start of a race.” Troxel herself doesn’t track her sleep and says that, while increased awareness is positive, getting obsessive about the data can be anxiety-inducing. “If tracking is motivating, that’s great, but I wouldn’t focus on the specific stages of sleep because it’s the most inaccurate piece of data that the trackers will be tracking and is going to change across your lifespan.”

Your deep sleep percentage is, therefore probably “pretty meaningless”. “The idea of selectively trying to improve one stage of sleep is a fundamental misconception by the public,” Troxel says. Instead, it can be helpful to take a no-pressure holistic approach to your rest. There’s even a new movement in the sleep science world called Ru-SATED that emphasises that sleep health is multifactorial, including components like sleep duration, regularity, subjective satisfaction and sleep patterns. For those without a tracker, this is good news. It means you can check in on your sleep quality by simply asking yourself the question: “How restorative did my sleep feel?”