🥱 Poor Sleep

Hey,

Welcome to the issue.

In a world where working late and starting early are the only ways to be productive, we don’t always realise just how important a good night of ZZZZZs really is.

This small part of the day that we hardly remember has an outsized impact on how we feel for the rest of it.

So if we want to be at our peak, maybe skip the daily 3:00am coffee and 3:12am triathlon. Lets cut ourselves some slack and hit the snooze button every once in a while.

Let’s dive in 🔎

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🧠 The Problem

• Poor sleep is more common than we’d like to think. It includes sleep disorders, inadequate sleep duration and low sleep quality.

• It impacts the body and mind: increasing daytime fatigue, reducing productivity and leading to mood disturbances and impaired decision making.

🧶 How big’s the issue?

• The average adult needs at least seven hours of sleep per night. 1/3 of adults get less than this. That’s over 85m adults, just in the USA.

• 6-10% of adults experience chronic insomnia (which means very little to no sleep, night after night).

• The average child needs 8 to 12 hours of sleep, reducing as they get older. Up to 44% of kids may experience poor sleep.

🌎 Why it matters?

• Not enough sleep has a $411bn economic impact on the USA yearly and upwards of £34bn on the UK.

• Productivity loss is estimated to cost $44bn in the US every year, with those who report poor sleep being twice as likely to be absent from work.

  • Working days lost to poor sleep total 1.23m, 604k, 207k and 209k annually for the US, Japan, UK and Germany respectively.

• Poor sleep has been linked to the development of Type-2 Diabetes, Cardiovascular disease, depression and obesity, and even associated with an increased risk of dementia and death.

🌱 Root Causes

• Stress and the ‘always-on’ mentality. The present trend of productivity hacking diminishes the real value of rest and renewal.

• Increased use of blue-light emitting devices before bedtime disrupts circadian rhythms (our body’s natural 24-hour clock and cycle).

• Poor diet, lack of exercise, excessive caffeine and alcohol consumption, smoking and other lifestyle factors all impact our sleep.

🫵 Who’s solving it?

The whole sleep economy (encompassing products, services and applications) is estimated to be valued at $585bn by 2025 and will continue to grow.

• Calm / Headspace / Moshi: Apps packed with soothing sounds and meditations for healthy sleep and general wellbeing.

• Apple / FitBit / Garmin / Oura / Whoop: Wearable sleep trackers measure sleep data so that we can geek-out on optimising all the personalised variables.

• Spacegoods / Dream Distillery / Innermost: A new breed of branded sleep supplements, from Melatonin to CBD.

• Sleep Number / Bryte / Eight Sleep: Smart mattresses analyse and optimise sleep.

Even more below - including:

• 11 predictions for the future of the sleep economy.

• 10 ideas for solving poor sleep.

• 5 resources to dive deeper into this issue.