Sleep Apnea Explained: The Causes And
The Treatment (Dr Nick Knight, October 2018)
How To Get More Sleep (Dr Nick Knight,
November 2017)
Insomnia Cures For The Restless Gent
(Stuart Stone, May 2017)More from G For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk /magazinethe industrial origami of folding them into
small boxes – done by a machine that costs
£1m and only when you click “buy” (leave
it folded any longer than a few weeks, I’m
told, and it’ll start to take on the shape of
the box).
Suddenly, they didn’t need shops: mat-
tresses could be posted! The sleep revolution
was born.
In the States, when a company called Casper
launched around the same time, in 2014, the
likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Ashton Kutcher,
Nas and 50 Cent all invested, all realising
they were lying on a gold mine. Casper is now
valued at almost £800m.
I later speak to one of Casper’s founders,
Neil Parikh, over the phone, who mentions
something key.
One upshot of the 2008 financial crisis,
he says, was that, in the following years, “It
wasn’t cool to sleep four hours a night any
more, you know? There used to be this whole
banker culture, crushing it at work, 100-
hour weeks, let’s brag about how little sleep
we get. And we started to turn the curve on
that. When we started in 2014, our goal was
to think about people sleeping better. People
resting more. We got people to start think-
ing about sleep.”
In May this year, not long after we spoke,
The Pokémon Company announced a
new game would be released in 2020. The
company had already been widely praised
for 2016’s Pokémon Go, the record- breaking
app game that turned the act of walking
into entertainment. Its next game would be
Pokémon Sleep. It would reward your hours
in bed.
On a recent night, as I was trying to nod
off, I considered trying out one of the new
“sleep sounds” that come built in to Alexa.
As I decided between the likes of “rain on a
tent”, “fireplace”, “space deck” and “wind”,
I remembered what its developer, Nick
Schwab, had told me was one of the most
requested new sounds, one you might not
suspect, a sound that, for as long as anyone
can remember, has been the one that has
kept us awake.
“Snoring,” he told me. “People say their
partners are away on a business trip and they
miss hearing them. It’s kind of sweet.” Gearplugs (“They work very well”) and then,
finally, to sleep.
Does he get a perfect score? “Yeah, pretty
much.” What doesn’t work? “Having a partner
next to me.”
And yet, he says he purposefully doesn’t
check his Oura Ring score first thing. “I don’t
want to be told by my ring how I’ll feel that
day. I don’t want to be primed by it.” And
so, instead, he’ll meditate for seven minutes,
make a bulletproof coffee, put his ring on
charge “and then I’ll look at the score”.Earlier this year I took a short walk
to London’s Tottenham Court
Road, where I was due to meet
David Wolfe, the enjoyably gruff
cofounder of Leesa Sleep mat-
tresses, where we were due to go mattress
shopping together.
Have you ever wondered why all mattresses
now have women’s names (Leesa, Emma, Eve,
etc), are promoted on podcasts and arrive inthey currently face is the overuse of sleep
trackers. The Oura Ring gives you a score
every morning. People try to beat that
score then get obsessed by it. Eventually,
they worry about it so much they stop sleep-
ing. Last year, sleep scientists even gave it a
name: orthosomnia.
“My view of sleep trackers is slightly
cynical,” says Dr Guy Leschziner, clinical
lead for the Sleep Disorders Centre at Guy’s
Hospital and author of The Nocturnal Brain.
“If you’re not sleeping enough, you know
that already. You don’t need a tracker to
tell you.”
When patients see Meadows at The Sleep
School, meanwhile, the first thing he does is
tell them to stand their trackers down.
To get an alternative perspective, I meet Tim
Gray, CEO of Health Optimisation Ltd and a
self-described “biohacker”. Gray, 39, dresses
like an off-duty Premier League footballer
and reacts to my ordering a Coke as though
I’d asked for a plutonium smoothie: “Ha! Did
you just say Coke?” I can’t have a Coke? “No
j udgement, mate, have what you like. But
you can put Coke on an engine and it cleans
it. Imagine what it’s doing to your gut bacteria
and your...”
I order an orange juice.
There are up to 18 specific things, Gray tells
me, he does every day to optimise his sleep
at night, a routine honed by endless experi-
mentation and checked by his Oura Ring data
the next day.
He runs me through a typical day: wake
up, glass of water with hypertonic (“which
has 78 minerals, twice the concentration
of blood”), no breakfast, “ bulletproof”
coffee (“with coconut oil, some col-
lagen peptides in there to repair the gut
lining”), lunch at 2pm (“I only eat in a six-
to-eight-hour window”), dinner no later than
three-and-a-half hours before bed (“other-
wise I’m using energy to digest, [as] opposed
to healing”), blue-blocking glasses for the
last three hours (“You need to get away from
blue light for the last four hours really”),
50-100 milligrams of supplement niacin in
the last half hour (“It helps calm the brain”),
bed at 11.30pm-11.45pm (when his Oura
Ring recommends), Himalayan rock salt lamp
next to the bed (“It keeps the air with the
right ions”), a chilly pad under the bed-
sheet (“for body-temperature regulation”),
an essential oil diffuser on the side (“which
I put lavender in, depending on my goal”),
natural latex pillow (“very supportive, based
on my posture”), natural foam mattress (“so
it’s not full of petrochemicals”), a hypoaller-
genic duvet, a red-light stack (“I have that
on remote control”), a blackout blind (“so it’s
completely black), a grounding bedsheet (“so
you’re connecting with the earth”), siliconOn thesecond nightI dreamtthe Sleep Robotwas trying tosmothermean impossibly small, upright box around an
eighth of its size? Well, Wolfe is one of the
mattress innovators you can thank. If you
want to see where our current sleep gold rush
began, you could do worse than start here.
Wolfe cofounded Leesa, which is currently
worth £80m, four years ago. He describes an
industry that was stagnant and complacent.
One ripe for mattress disruption.
“It was a very, very antiquated industry,” he
says. “Very little technology. Very little retail.
It was an industry that had been sleeping...
for want of a better word.”
Talk to any of the mattress upstarts and
they will tell you something similar: that
everything a shop used to sell you a mattress
was nonsense. Side, front or back sleeper?
Their research showed that during the night
we all do all three. Hard, soft or medium?
Just nonsense to get you through the door to
lie on them. The new upstarts realised from
their research that they could create a uni-
versal mattress. But the key innovation wasSLEEP09-19FeatureBusinessofSleep.indd 179 03/07/2019 14:40
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