I have a confession: I am a techy. And, I believe tech can help you sleep better.
I know: Phones, TVs, and other gadgets can wreck sleep. I get why Arianna’s bedroom is tech-free, especially when it comes to the #1 seducer -- the smartphone. Who's texting me? My kid? My boss? And when’s that new outfit I ordered from Amazon going to be delivered?
A restless, racing brain is the enemy of sleep.
So why do I make the case that tech can help us get to sleep, stay asleep, and improve sleep quality?
Because, I’ve seen people fall asleep and sleep better using tech. Safely. Without medication or other drugs.
Given that sleeplessness is an epidemic, this is a big deal.
Here’s another confession: I didn’t set out to help people fall asleep and stay asleep -- or to put tech in the bedroom. It was serendipitous.
Two decades ago, my father, bio-physicist Dr. Benjamin Gavish, was studying the use of modern technology to harness the ancient wisdom of therapeutic breathing in order to lower high blood pressure and stress. He succeeded, and together we patented and developed technology that has become the first non-drug hypertension treatment device cleared by the FDA. Used by hundreds of thousands of patients, the technology has been validated in numerous scientific studies and by an American Heart Association statement.
Enter serendipity: It turns out that users of our device were dozing off during sessions, and over 90% of them reported improved sleep!
We have spent the past few years studying and researching the intersection of technology, breathing, and sleep. What we’ve learned is that there is much that smart devices can do to help us sleep better.
I’d like to share with you three proven areas where tech and smart devices can be used to empower us to sleep better - tracking, coaching, and actually inducing sleep.
Tracking Sleep
To begin with, smart devices can help us zero in on our sleep problem.
Do we stay up too late night after night? Do we turn in early but find ourselves unable to fall asleep? Perhaps we fall asleep just fine but wake up often. Do we wake up at midnight only to find we are unable to fall asleep again? Or do we simply wake up too early in the morning?
It seems that we should know what our sleep issues are. But for many, extended sleeplessness and the resulting frustration can lead to distorted recall of how much we truly sleep.
There are various trackers and sleep diaries you can use to follow your nights for a week or two until your problem becomes clear. Two words of caution: First, don’t get overly obsessed with tracking. It’s a sure way to lose sleep. Second, if you repeatedly wake up tired despite sufficient hours of sleep, skip the sleep gadgets and head to your doctor to rule out sleep apeana.
Once you have a sense of your sleep issues, we can begin to figure out how to solve them.
Coaching you to sleep
As readers of The Huffington Post, you are likely familiar with experts’ tips for good sleep habits.
These tips grew out of therapist-based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for insomnia (CBTi) programs, which have been clinically proven to improve sleep better than sleeping pills. CBTi aims to change patients’ beliefs and attitudes about insomnia, provide sleep hygiene insights (the tips), and train us in pre-sleep relaxation techniques.
For the super humans who can self-educate, follow a regimen, and make adjustments to their beliefs and habits on their own, these suggestions can be the difference between being well rested and being a zombie. The rest of us mortals who need assistance to change our habits can either go to a CBTi therapist, or leverage tech with online and mobile-based CBTi programs, which have been clinically proven as effective as in-person therapist-based programs.
Perhaps the most important, yet hardest part of CBTi to master, is the pre-sleep relaxation techniques, which leads us to our next element.
Tech to induce sleep
Our inability to shut off our racing minds is typically THE obstacle to sleep. The vast majority of those with chronic sleeplessness report anxiety, endless thoughts, and stress as the number one reasons they can’t sleep. And here is the rub, sanitizing your bedroom of tech still won’t turn off your head.
To help, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends deep breathing to quiet our racing thoughts. The problem is that sleep-inducing-breathing exercises are very specific, difficult to master, and require concentration to do correctly.
It’s a frustrating paradox: consciously thinking about relaxing is work- and this keeps us from relaxing.
This is where tech comes in.
The mobile revolution has enabled a wide range of apps with relaxing sounds, guided imagery, and simple breathing exercises.
In our own devices (as reported here in Huffington Post), we avoid the visual distraction of tech while using its audio and bluetooth capability to compose personalized real time tones to guide users’ breathing to induce sleep. In this way, we remove the ‘thinking about relaxing’ that keeps us so frustrated… and awake.
And it works. Users as young as 7 and as old as 85 are telling us that breathing to sleep has changed their lives.
As crazy as it sounds, humans may have gotten to the point that it is easier to use a machine to help shut off our minds than it is to lie in a dark quiet room and wait for the noise in our heads to die down.
The bottom line
The bad news is that sleeplessness has reached epidemic proportions. The good news is that tech is catching up. We are learning, and as we do we are bringing solutions. Stay tuned and don’t give up on smart devices. Sleeping with the enemy never sounded so good.