Sleep is literally our life support system, says sleep scientist Dr Matt Walker. But is the viral social media trend of ‘sleepmaxxing’ the big fix?

As a Gen X-er, I remember a time when we routinely hauled out the amount of stress in our lives as our badge of honour. Ask us how we were, and we’d launch into a litany of all the fires we’d put out before 10am. “I’m so stressed,” we’d sigh, more as a modest-brag of how busy, productive and capable we were – superwomen juggling demanding careers and family, or yummy mummies braving the afternoon traffic to ferry our millennial babies from one extramural to the next.

Fast-forward to 2024, and we’ve now done a 180: it seems the thing everyone from Gen X-ers to Gen Z’s is mainlining, is SLEEP. And in true Gen Z fashion, there’s a gas (that’s ‘cool’, in Zoomer-speak) name for the trend going viral on TikTok: sleepmaxxing. It’s a general term to describe the various tips, tech and strategies the platform’s users are employing to get what they consider the ‘perfect’ night’s sleep. The sleep wave started with UC Berkeley neuroscientist Dr Matthew Walker’s acclaimed and important 2013 bestseller, Why We Sleep, and has now swelled to a tsunami of options that include everything from a nightly bedtime regimen, regular sleep and wake-up times and countless supplements to blackout curtains, noise-cancelling headbands, moon juice magnesium mocktails, the latest AI sleep tech (including a mattress that self-regulates its temperature and can gently wake you with vibrations) and an entire range of face and body swaddles that scream “No sex please, we’re looksmaxxing!” Then there’s the oura ring, which, frankly, unless you’re a genuine sleep tracker like Matt Walker himself, just makes you look like a member of some secret cult – or a Trekkie.

But in the age of AGI, that might be a plus or, as they say in classic Zoomer-speak,
a W (for WIN).

As trends go, we could do worse – especially since the World Health Organization (WHO) pronounced sleep deprivation a “growing epidemic”. The list of 80 or so sleep disorders identified to date include obstructive sleep apnoea, chronic insomnia, restless legs syndrome and narcolepsy. More concerning, however, are the myriad negative effects sleep deprivation could have on our health and wellbeing, including putting us at risk of ailments such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, anxiety, depression and dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. 

But sleep is a no-brainer, right? It’s as common as eating and breathing – so why is it becoming a ‘global epidemic?’

Well, there’s a yin and a yang in everything. You could blame it on Thomas Edison powering up an entire area in Manhattan with electric light in 1882 - near Wall Street, interestingly. Matthew Walker does, even though his entire body of work and multiple online talks wouldn’t have been possible without it. But that’s a bit unfair on Matt. He’s not exactly suggesting we go back to the, er… dark ages. And he has a point. Which is, that we’re all getting caught up in the “I just want to live while I’m alive” syndrome (here’s looking at you, Jon Bonjovi!). 

In other words, it’s both the pressures and the pleasures of modern life. We work hard, and we play hard. And as we grew up and started families, making it difficult to regularly seek outside evening entertainment, the party was brought to us – hello, Netflix, Disney and social media! And that, right there, with its exposure to blue light at night and our engagement, is our golden circle, front-row seatto sleep deprivation and the health disorders that arise from it.

Gen Z-ers seem to be the ones most affected by sleep deprivation: An American Academy of Sleep Medicine survey found that 93 percent of respondents “lost sleep because they stayed up ‘past their bedtime’scrolling social media. Other sleep loss drivers for Zoomers include anxiety about exams, future job prospects and, naturally, romance and dating issues. 

 Millennials, on the other hand, have grown up in the health, wellbeing and fitness rage of the 1990s and “are prioritising sleep”, while “actively seeking solutions”, says a 2022 study in Sleep Medicine Reviews. These Gen Y-ers are also mostly educated, with established careers, and are more likely to be able to afford the latest sleep tech.

While older folks need as much sleep as everyone else, according to sleep scientists they don’t seem to be getting much for a variety of reasons, including chronic lifestyle diseases and the general aches and pains that accompany advancing age. So it seems this “growing epidemic” has done what little else could: close the generation gap – and not in a good way.

And what the viral TikTok trend has done is make people aware of the importance of sleep to health and wellbeing as well as the positive impact it could have on our mood (by October last year it had racked up almost 97 million posts). Also, that quality sleep is vital to wellbeing at any and every age. 

The question is, is sleepmaxxing the ultimate solution?

Sleep scientist Dr Vanessa Hill seems to think so. In an interview on CBS News, Dr Hill,who is alsothe creator of the hit YouTube and PBS series, BrainCraft, said: “Personally, I think it's really good when we do have sleep trends like this.It means people are thinking about their sleep, they're prioritising their sleep, when often we're not allowing enough time for sleep…and we're procrastinating our bedtime.” 

A Washington Post analysis published in April 2024 suggests that the trend is working, finding that Americans, at least, are sleeping more now than “at any point in the last two decades’, and that this trend had accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Significantly, the cohorts registering the most shuteye were young people between the ages of 25 and 34, men of all ages, and people who don’t have children. 

However, trends that start life on social media tend to go to extremes rather quickly (let’s call it trendmaxxing), with everyone from the average person to influencers and even big business hopping onboard (enter, profitmaxxing).And in recent years, doctors  and psychologists have noticed yet another trend: patients have increasingly been seeking consultations for self-diagnosed sleep issues after using sleep tech and other wearable sleep aids to optimise their shuteye. It’s a phenomenon called orthosomnia, a term coined byresearchers at Rush Medical College and the Feinberg School of Medicine. Often, these patients would report having felt refreshed and well-rested upon waking up, only to feel let-down and anxious when their sleep tech told a different story. This seems to have set off an endless cycle starting with anxiety about what the tech would reveal come morning, and ending with sleepless nights verging on insomnia.

“When patients become obsessed with the data obtained from their devices — for instance, with the focus on the duration of their sleep, the quality of their sleep, and the percentage of stages of sleep that seem out of range —”,  says Dr Jag Sunderram, a professor of medicine and sleep specialist at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, “that by itself can promote anxiety about sleep and predispose to insomnia.”

Which is not to say the there isn’t any merit to the devices.“We're a data-informed culture now, and [they] can be helpful,” says NYU Langone Health clinical psychologist, Thea Gallagher. But, she adds, “sometimes it can become obsessive and exacerbate anxious thoughts that are already there.”

Other studies suggest that some of these consumer sleep trackers perform as well, or even better than an actigraphy, which is the gold standard lab test sleep scientists and physicians use to diagnose insomnia and other sleep disorders. The test includes deriving data from a wrist-worn device and can only be done in a sleep lab or under the supervision of a sleep physician. However, while they are becoming more sophisticated, few of these devices have the sensitivity to be able to measure the various sleep stages we’ve completed on any particular night, nor do we as patients have the capacity to interpret the data correctly anyway, says Dr Gallagher. 

And while some of the non-tech sleep hacks can help you unwind and relax, says Ellen Wermter, a nurse practitioner and behavioural sleep medicine specialist with the US Society of Behavioural Sleep Medicine, the more extreme practices could hamper your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep in the long run because your brain could come to see the ritual as necessary for slumber. They could also come to seem more like hard work, adding more stress to your day. “It comes down to intent,” she says. “If the intent is ‘I am doing this because I need these interventions in order to sleep,’ they’re no longer useful.”

The first “myth” about shut-eye that sleep physiologist and founder of the Sleepyhead Clinic in the UK, Stephanie Romiszewski would like to see busted is that we ‘need’ 7-9 hours every night. She agrees that the body craves regularity, but told Steven Bartlett on his Diary of a CEO podcast that the emphasis on a nightly 7-9 hours creates an anxiety around sleep that becomes counterproductive. We need to think about it differently,she says: “The way we look at time is slightly different to the way your body looks at time and over a month you might actually be alright. So maybe one night you get six and a half hours, the next night you get seven and a half and then the next night [it might be] slightly different – as long as it's fairly consistent, that's okay…your body…will do what it needs to do.”

The same goes for the idea of ‘sleep debt’, she adds. For starters, it’s not an eye for an eye. If you’ve lost four hours, it doesn’t mean you have to make up four. “The reality is your brain is so smart that even in the certain amount of hours that you get normally at night it can recover you from that sleep deprivation by just improving or increasing the sleep stage that it thinks you missed the most…”

It’s when our expectation doesn't get met that we get upset about it, she says, and then we change our behaviour – and that's when we start experiencing sleep problems. Romiszewski insists that it’s not so much your bedtime that you need to keep regular; a constant, consistent wake-up time is far more crucial. (See “Sleep, Nature’s Soft Nurse” on this website for more info on this.)

Most sleep experts agree that if constant reminders of how little sleep you’ve had triggers anxiety or anxious thoughts, perhaps the hi-tech interventions are not for you, at least not without the supervision of a trained sleep professional and only if your sleep deprivation is, in fact, dire. Far better would be to first try simple, consistent practices such as Matt Walker and others sleep scientists’ sleep hygiene methods to gently coax slumber. (Again, see “Sleep, Nature’s Soft Nurse” on this website for more info.) While an AI headband cancelling brain waves that keep you awake might seem like the best idea and could well be the miracle cure for some, most sleep experts agree that falling asleep either too fast or too slowly are both bad for you. The time you take to drift off is called sleep latency, and ideally takes about 15 minutes.

Trends on social media definitely have their place on the information highway, and with the huge variety of experiences out there, chances are you’ll find a good option for you. But social media trends are a complex mix of the reality on the ground, really good crowd-sourcing ideas, as well as the opportunists that jump on the bandwagon to either make a quick buck or be part of the crowd. Then there are the legions of the selfie generation wanting their 15 minutes of fame, or those just messing about for a laugh and muddying the waters. In other words, exercise common sense: try the options that seem realistic and harmless, but take it all with a pinch of salt. And if your sleep issue has become a real problem, it might be best to book a consultation with your doctor.