>> just human beings are designed to sleep
outside with the sun going around our planet.
I’m just connecting the two things up. So let’s
just pitch our tents, because you’re going to
get better recovery, mate. ‘Really?’ they say.
Yeah. Champions League final coming up?
Get the tents in the car park.”If you want to isolate a time when the
idea of wellness began to dominate
our culture, you could do worse than
point to the 2008 financial crisis. In
a few short months an entire gener-
ation felt their grip on the future slip. Jobs
became scarce, before scarcely becoming
jobs. Zero hours became the new nine to
five. Suddenly, nearly everyone needed a side
hustle and nearly everyone else needed to be
told what one was. Property became a pipe
dream. Social media showed them what they
didn’t have. Generation Anxious was born.
Headspace, the digital health and meditation
platform launched by former Buddhist monk
Andy Puddicombe, arrived in 2010 to calm
worried minds and make a buck while doing
so. It’s currently worth £255m. Relaxation app
Calm joined the party in 2012 and launched a
“Sleep Stories” section in 2016, many of which
are read by celebrities. You can currently listen
to Matthew McConaughey say things such
as, “How often do we ponder the depth of
the present moment?” It is currently valued
at £787m. If millennials couldn’t control the
world around them, then maybe they could at
least manage how they felt about it.
On a recent spring afternoon I took a short
Tube ride to Highbury & Islington, London,
and to the attic room of a top-floor Victorian
flat that overlooks the train station and acts
as the headquarters of Mela Comfort, the
weighted-blanket start-up founded in late
2017 by university friends Samuel Hochland,
30, and Matthew King, 29. The room
(Hochland and his girlfriend live below) con-
sists of a sofa, a desk and a whiteboard with
things like “Offer value!!!” and “Final Amazon
launch” and “Podcasts!!!” written on it. A
well-thumbed copy of the Steve Jobs biog-
raphy by Walter Isaacson sat in the corner.
Hochland, who brings to mind a young
Steve Buscemi, explained that he and King
had been looking to start a business in the
booming area of sleep when they came across
the 2017 Kickstarter campaign of a US start-
up called Gravity. The company seemed to
be offering something magical: a weighted
blanket that would “treat sleep, stress and
anxiety”. Its goal was £17,000; it raised more
than £3.5m. The only problem was it couldn’t
deliver. A Facebook group sprang up (Anti
Gravity Blanket: “The ‘waited’ blanket that
creates stress and anxiety because it doesn’t
ship”) and threats of legal action followed.The idea of a weighted blanket wasn’t tech-
nically new: over a decade earlier, parents
had discovered autistic children would finally
settle if they had extra weight on them and
so started sewing pennies into duvets. It’s
the same science, everyone in the weighted-
blanket business will tell you, behind why
you swaddle a baby. It’s like being held tightly.
Only now the target market had changed: it
was anxious millennials who required swad-
dling to sleep.
Hochland was sceptical at first: “How can
something so low-tech have such a profound
effect on people?” But he soon came around
when his girlfriend, who suffers from panic
attacks, used one for the first time and found
it was the only thing that had ever helped her
(“She said, ‘This is a game-changer for me’”).
They knew how much Gravity’s blanket cost
to make (not much) and felt they could make
a better one, cheaper (Steve Jobs’ mantra:
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t
used to an environment where excellence isHochland, meanwhile, cited the key pres-
sures – “There’s a lot of social pressures, work
pressures, economic pressures, personal pres-
sures” – that now require duvet pressure.
But he also mentioned something else:
many don’t buy the blankets to sleep. They
buy them, he said, to swaddle themselves on
their sofas.Talk to any sleep expert for long
enough and eventually they will
mention their nemesis. It is always
the same person. In 2017 Netflix
CEO Reed Hastings was asked what
he considered to be his biggest rival. Amazon
Prime perhaps? HBO Go? Neither, he said.
“When you watch a show from Netflix and
you get addicted to it, you stay up late at
night. We’re competing with sleep.”
This did not go down well.
“He said they’re going to war!” says
Matthew Walker, author of the 2017 world-
wide bestseller Why We Sleep. “It felt very
Game Of Thrones. Everybody was armouring
themselves up to go to battle against sleep. I
think it’s a disgrace. I think it’s a terrible dis-
service. And I’ll give you one good reason,
because I believe that CEO has children.”
Three months ago, Walker says, he received
an email from a father who lost his wife and
youngest child in a drowsy-driving traffic acci-
dent. He wrote to Walker to praise his book
and specifically the chapter that pointed out
that a lack of sleep causes more fatalities on
our roads than drugs and alcohol combined.
“So, you know, he can go out there and make
these catchy clickbait public statements about
going to war with sleep. But I suspect that if
he returned home one evening and someone
who’d been awake for 22 hours straight – at
which point you are legally drunk in terms of
your performance – had taken away some
of his family members, I think he’d probably be
less forthright about his battle against sleep.”
And don’t get them started on Netflix’s
“auto-play” time of five seconds, which
ensures, they will tell you, we don’t even
have enough time to locate the remote before
the next episode starts.
“It used to be 15 seconds,” says Meadows.
“It was too easy for people to turn off.”
An independent GQ study – I logged into
Netflix – reveals this is not entirely accu-
rate. Netflix Original shows now auto-play
after five seconds, but the rest remain at a
leisurely 15.
I asked Netflix about the discrepancy. The
new five-second countdown, it said, was “an
innovation with our original content – we
haven’t got there yet with licensed content”.
The spokesperson added, “Fun fact: if your
line of thought is people get caught up watch-
ing great shows instead of sleeping, this is no‘Ronaldo ison Instagramall the time,talking abouthis naps’expected”). They used quartz micro-pellets
for the weight, so it wouldn’t rustle (as some
did) or leak (as the ones with sand tended to:
“People were waking up with patches of sand
in their bed,” said King). They sold theirs from
£125 each, less than half the price of Gravity’s.
They launched their products last spring and
sold £180,000 worth in four days alone in
December. In the final quarter of this year they
project to sell £10m worth, despite a plethora
of weighted- blanket rivals having joined them,
all promising to pin you to your bed.
The one bottleneck? Well, postage:
weighted blankets are heavy.
“And we get people from Texas saying it’s
45C outside,” said Hochland. They’re sweat-
ing for their swaddling. Hochland and King,
though, plan to create a version using high-
tech cooling fabrics.
King put the problem in a global context:
“People are looking for natural solutions to
sleep. Look what’s happening in America with
the whole prescription opioid crisis.”09-19FeatureBusinessofSleep.indd 176 03/07/2019 14:40
184 GQ.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2019