80 August 17/August 24, 2020
the red-eye from New York City to Lisbon, I grog-
gily deplane and replane for the short flight to Porto,
down another espresso and drive the one and a half
hours to the Douro Valley. By the time I arrive at the
hotel, the sun is beginning to set and my bed looks
very inviting. It is only 5 p.m.
I’m led to my room by a woman named Vera who
introduces my supplies: an eye mask, bamboo paja-
mas, earplugs, lavender spray for my bed and a worry
journal where I can write down anything bothering
me before I sleep. I flop down on the €2,500 mattress
and hope that whatever I learn here will be easily
transferable to the $200 mattress I bought off Ama-
zon and my sad cotton-blend sheets. By the bed is
a small box made by ResMed, which will track my
movements while I sleep and present me with col-
orful graphs of data each morning.
I follow the given instructions: eat dinner lei-
surely, have only one glass of wine, take a bath in
the deep tub, drink chamomile tea, put on the new
pajamas, write in the journal and go to bed around
10 p.m. When I wake up, the ResMed app shows a
series of colorful bars—my “sleep architecture” pro-
gression through deep, REM and light sleep—and a
score of 97. “I had nothing to say about that sleep,”
shrugs Javier Suarez, the director of the spa and well-
ness programs at Douro Valley, at my first consulta-
tion. He studied physiotherapy at the University of
California, San Francisco (UCSF), and he knows this
is abnormally good. “What we [often] see here is the
first night, [guests] sleep bad because they come jet-
lagged or they’re anxious,” he says. I’d slept a hard,
uninterrupted eight hours. I feel proud of the prep
I did before I came, adjusting my bedtime to try to
prevent jet lag.
There are many scientific reasons to desire
good sleep. Poor sleep quality is associated with a
whole host of unhealthy side effects. Getting bad
sleep puts people at a higher risk for diabetes,
cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, impaired
memory, problem-solving issues, fatigue, anxiety,
mood disturbances and poor performance at work.
There’s a market, then, to help people sleep better,
not just because it makes money, but also because
it is generally good for people. “There’s no wellness
without good sleep. Forget about it,” Suarez tells
me. “If you don’t make sleep your priority, then you
will not be healthy.”
The Global Wellness Institute attributes the grow-
ing wellness industry to four things: an aging popu-
lation, increased global rates of chronic disease and
stress, the negative health impacts of environmen-
tal degradation and the frequent failures of modern
Western medicine. In the case of insomniacs, the
ever popular sleep drugs Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata
and others received black-box warnings from the
FDA—the agency’s most serious caution—in May
- Those turned off by the foreboding packaging
may turn to more holistic sleep-wellness methods.
Sleep scientists have also been working to better
publicize their research on the benefits of sleep hy-
giene. In 2013, the CDC and the American Academy
of Sleep Medicine launched the National Healthy
Sleep Awareness Project, which aimed to raise pub-
lic knowledge of sleep disorders and the ways sleep
affects health.
Obsession is the inevitable peak of any trend.
While I’m at the resort, Suarez recommends several
other ways I can optimize my health, including Well-
ness FX, a company that will run a full blood panel,
and Viome, a company you can mail your poop to in
order to learn about your gut micro biome. We have
the ability now to analyze absolutely everything^
An outdoor
resting spot
at the sleep
retreat at
Six Senses
Douro Valley
in Portugalabout ourselves sans doctor oversight: our blood
pressure, our pH, our urine, our poop, our genes.
Sleep is just part of the cultural movement toward
health obsession. A 2017 study done by Rebecca
Robbins at New York University found that a full
28.2% of people in the U.S. track their sleep—with
an app, a wearable sleep tracker, or both—and Rob-
bins, now a postdoctoral fellow at the Brigham and
Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School,
says she thinks that number has likely increased
since the study.
All this data is what runs the sleep-wellness in-
dustry. Every major sleep-wellness company track-
ing sleep is collecting data—cumulative data. Eight
Sleep, for example, says it has 40 million hours
of sleep traffic logged. Alexandra Zatarain, a co-
founder and vice president of brand and marketing
for the company, says the medical establishment
has “never had access to people’s actual sleep [out-
side of] clinical settings.” Six Senses, on the other
hand, has complete data about how people sleep
when they’re on vacation, thanks to their sleep pro-Sleep