What does the data actually mean?

I have a few friends who love their Whoop, it tells them they’re an athlete, they’re elite, and helps them to manage their workouts. I personally think it’s a great device.

But when I’ve asked people explain to me what HRV is, they almost never understand what it actually is or what it really means. They know there is a number, it’s somehow related to their heart and cardiovascular fitness, which isn’t quite right, and they obsess over seeing the number go up or down on any given day.

We’ve given them a metric to track, and they feel like they are in control, but if you don’t know what is actually being measured, why do we care about the number?

Sleep is littered with these metrics. In the past we’ve talked about how sleep time doesn’t dictate sleep quality, and that the value in sleep is in the Neural Function of Sleep, not how many minutes are spent in any specific sleep stage.

As the sleep industry moves away from duration focused measures of sleep (which will be a long slow process), we’re seeing apps discuss the intricate details of Neural Function. Recently, with the recognition of the value of slow-waves during sleep, we’re seeing EEG devices try to differentiate themselves from other trackers by sharing details about the number of slow-waves in any night, or the length of a slow-wave train. Only EEG trackers, like our own Affectable Sleep Headband, can capture this kind of data, but just because it is recorded, does that automatically mean it is valuable to the user?

Specifically when we look at slow-wave activity, the numbers themselves are misleading. You might see more slow-waves than usual because each one has lower power. Your brain compensates by producing extra ones to get the same restoration done. That does not mean better sleep. It often means weaker, less efficient slow-waves.

Slow-wave trains can last longer too. But the waves usually get smaller as the train continues. Counting more slow-waves might just mean weaker ones adding up, not stronger activity.

Delta power alone misleads as well. It shows overall strength but ignores wave count and quality. High power with few waves differs from low power with many. Without the full context, these numbers can make your sleep look better or worse than it really is.

When many users don’t understand the more simple metrics like HRV, do we really expect them to dive into understanding the measures of slow-wave activity? Even if they did understand, how does knowing the numbers help them?

When hiding data provides a better experience and outcome

While people will tell you about their HRV scores, or resting heart-rate, you never hear of a person with a CGM telling you about their glucose readings. Why is that? They don’t really even need to know what the numbers mean. The devices give them a basic chart which shows the ups and downs, and likely danger levels. They understand what their diet is like and what is affecting their metabolism. The number itself doesn’t matter. The rate of change is all they need to know, and that is what the devices focus on.

The Shapa scale is a brilliant example of this. It’s a bathroom scale, but instead of showing you a number, it shows a color. The color isn’t defined by if your weight was up or down on that day, but rather how your weight is trending over time. It isn’t important to know if at this moment on this day you are 1/2 a pound heavier or lighter. Weight fluctuates, as does the time of day we take our measurements. Having a discrete number today isn’t helpful. It causes people to celebrate a win that may just be dehydration, or beat themselves up for a perceived negative result, which may also be a mirage. By showing only the trend over time by a color-code, the scale gives you the information to help you understand your health, without diving into the data.

I was struck by this idea, what data does a person actually need. Not what do they want, but what truly serves their needs. What puts them in control without overloading them with meaningless numbers or goals that don’t lead anywhere.

Have we gamified a metric that doesn’t move the needle?

I regularly hear people talking about what they are doing to spend more time in deep sleep, or to increase their deep sleep percentage. The percentage part is easy. Sleep less, and your percentage goes up. Misleading sure, but that’s the way it works. Want to increase time in deep sleep, take benzodiazepines. They will absolutely destroy the Neural Function of Sleep, leave you groggy and damage your cognition and health, but your deep sleep time will likely increase.

In the first Apple watch, they attempted to move away from sleep staging and instead focused on the more valuable and actionable consistency of wake and sleep time, which research shows is a better predictor of health than sleep duration (link to our post). Sadly, due to user expectations, Apple added sleep staging in a later addition to the Apple watch, which continues to gamify sleep duration.

Breaking free of the expected

At Affectable Sleep, we have a unique opportunity to do this differently and move away from overloaded and misleading data. Our headband accurately measures EEG and sleep activity through the night. We can share details about sleep regularity and consistency, which is within the control of the user. It’s something they can attempt to adapt or easily understand at least.

The core benefit is our UltraSleep™ stimulation, which enhances the Neural Function of Sleep, without altering sleep time or architecture. Because we measure the difference between stimulation and non-stimulation activity, we can describe what natural Neural Function looks like, versus the measured response to stimulation. This can be provided without overloading details or difficult to understand metrics which are also mostly impossible to influence directly.

We’re not asking you to take action, we’re providing the benefit for you while you sleep.

This is the future of wearables, going beyond tracking our biometrics and showing pretty graphs, to directly affecting our neurology, biology, and physiology to improve our health in real-time.

Our end goal is that people wake up feeling great and don’t have to be concerned about the metrics of their sleep.

Find out more

Here at Affectable Sleep, we focus on enhancing the vital processes that happen during sleep that support your brain and body to function on the daily. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance Sleep’s Neural Function without altering sleep time. Affectable Sleep is pioneering a new type of wearable, that goes beyond harvesting our data and showing us pretty graphs, to directly affecting our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve our health in real-time.

Learn more at our website and follow our thinking and research on Linkedin

For the past 5.5 years we’ve been developing neurostimulation technologies to enhance the Neural Function of Sleep. We’ve always kept an eye on what is happening in the pharmaceutical space, and what pharmaceuticals could offer in improving the Neural Function of Sleep, and where we’d stand as an alternative.

Though pharmaceutical interventions have improved in recent years with the latest pharmaceutical solutions, such as Belsomra, becoming significantly better at maintaining true restorative sleep while decreasing sleep onset, there still are no pharmaceuticals which increase Neural Function of Sleep.

I came across two conversations last week which brought this idea to the forefront.

In the first, a sleep therapist was arguing that we shouldn’t treat a sleep apnea pill as the “holy grail” because with a drug that reduces apnea events by 50%, he’d still prescribe CPAP.

Minutes later I read a post by a neuroscientist and therapist who uses magnetic neuromodulation (rTMS) to treat PTSD, and he reported he is seeing Ozempic type weight loss results from this treatment, which echoes how Ozempic was discovered as a weight loss treatment itself.

These two stories provide the perfect juxtaposition to help me further understand our position in the world of health.

Device or Molecule?

First, my thoughts on an Apnea pill. In this context, I completely disagree with the original post. CPAP is an invasive and blunt instrument in preventing apnea events. It is not only inconvenient for the wearer, it is also disruptive to their partner, difficult to use when travelling, uncomfortable, causes dryness in the nose and throat. Adherence is incredibly low because, for many people, the treatment is worse than the disease.

A pill for sleep apnea, even if it is less effective, is more convenient, has a lower up-front cost and is likely cost even over time (most people don’t realize CPAP masks must be replaced every month and headgear about every 6 months). Not only that, the cost for a person to try an apnea pill is almost nothing, and with home apnea tests, the potential to try and measure the response makes treatment more accessible to millions of people.

I’ve not been a fan of CPAP, I have a brother who had CPAP and moved to a mandibular device a few years ago. It was a game-changer for him! The math of how we consider treatments isn’t just “what has the best total efficacy on the disease, but rather efficacy * adherence.

Mandibular devices may not be as “effective” as CPAP, but because people are more likely to continue using them, the mandibular splint should be the go-to solution.

If the apnea pill proves to have similar efficacy to the mandibular splint, and better adherence, it should be the primary treatment, or at least an fast inexpensive trial to see if the patient responds.

So in this case, when convenience and adherence are a significant hurdle to treatment, a simple and inexpensive pill is the preferred solution over a medical device.

The Price of the Persistent Molecule

While a pill for apnea might be better than a mask, a device-based alternative to GLP-1 drugs might be better than a pill.

When you put a molecule into your body, you lose control over it. We saw the “happy accident” of this with Ozempic. A drug designed for insulin also hit the brain and silenced the demand for food and alcohol. But not all accidents are happy. People on these drugs deal with constant nausea, muscle loss, and potential damage to the gallbladder or thyroid.

The current trend in pharma is to make these peptide formulations last longer in the body. We are seeing reports of a once-a-month pill. This is where it gets risky.

In a healthy body, the natural version of GLP1 only has a half-life of two minutes. Your body releases the precise amount only when it is needed. A once-a-month pill means that same molecule is shouting at your system every second of every day for thirty days straight!

Tuning the Engine vs. Adding More Fuel

Neuromodulation offers a different path. Instead of flooding the system, it aims to strengthen the neural pathways the body already uses. You cannot get more power out of a broken engine just by adding more fuel. You have to tune the engine itself so it operates the way it was designed to.

The methods used in PTSD (like rTMS) are not easily accessible yet, but we are at the very beginning of a neurotechnology future. At Affectable Sleep, we are applying this logic to the brain during sleep. We focus on enhancing the Neural Function of Sleep. Research shows this improves memory, clears metabolic waste, and primes the immune system. These are results that current sleep pills simply cannot replicate.

There currently isn’t a pharmaceutical which has results anything similar to what Affectable’s Ultrasleep™ stimulation can accomplish. The stimulation is precise, and adapts to the activity of your brain at each individual moment.

I believe this is one of the most important future directions for either medical devices or pharmaceuticals.

A future where our treatments adapt to our physiology/biology/neurology in real-time to get the utmost benefit tuned to our immediate needs.

But that’s a discussion for another time.

Find Out More

Here at Affectable Sleep, we focus on enhancing the vital processes that happen during sleep that support your brain and body to function on the daily. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance Sleep’s Neural Function without altering sleep time. Affectable Sleep is pioneering a new type of wearable, that goes beyond harvesting our data and showing us pretty graphs, to directly affecting our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve our health in real-time.

Learn more at our website and follow our thinking and research on Linkedin

The Hype

What’s your biological age: I too bought into the idea that we could measure biological age through alternative “clocks” that measure a genetics or other biomarkers . If we can understand what cell aging looks like, we can directly measure the impacts of our longevity protocols. It’s an amazing promise, and from a scientific perspective, this is exactly how they are meant to be used. Take a population, provide them with a protocol, and measure the effects on the cells.

However, the clocks were not designed to measure how old “your” cells are. They were designed to be used on a population level, not an individual. For example, how smokers lungs age faster than non-smokers, but you can’t look at a single smoker and judge the health of . We can feed the data into a biological clock and get the result. Take a single individual and feed in their data, it will spit out one age now, and a different age a few minutes later. Amazing science misused as marketing hype. (Dr Matt Kaeberlein has a great video where he compares biological age tests)

Supplement Stacking: The science is clear. There isn’t a single supplement that increases longevity. Where supplements can help is to regulate stress, or improve your ability to work-out, potentially recover quicker. This is supplementation improving physical fitness, but really, how much improvement is there. Maybe 1-2%. The jury is mostly out, nothing has been proven to be very effective.
The three core levers of health are diet, exercise, and sleep. Supplements don’t improve your diet, and the latest hype in pro-biotics can be included here. They can have a small improvement in how intense your exercise can be, or improve recovery. In sleep, though some people say they benefit from magnesium, or glycine, these are not necessary if you are eating a healthy diet, and melatonin has been shown to have only a minor improvement in sleep-onset.
The hype around supplements is so large that studies have found less than 40% of supplements tested contained ANY of the DNA of the promised ingredient[1]. Included in this study were simple, available ingredients like cinnamon, tumeric, and ginger! This isn’t mystery medicine, it’s mirage.

Potential Promise: Metformin and Rapamycin continue to be the perpetual promises in the hype cycle. Over a decade we’ve looked at the potential these chemicals could have in extending life, but there has not yet been a single conclusive study that shows effectiveness.
Sadly, Metformin has been shown to blunt the benefits of exercise. Literally negating one of the greatest longevity levers we have. Rapamycin is backed up only by mouse-data, with potentially dangerous real-world side-effects. Even Bryan Johnson removed Rapamycin from his personal protocol due to the risks and lack of evidence.

GLP1s Real Solution + Hype: There is no doubt that GLP1s are amazing and are helping hundreds of millions of people, as well as becoming a pop culture phenomenon with names like Ozempic becoming a brand name as popular as Chanel, or Nike. So how dare I list them as hype? Well, you can’t look at any media these days without hearing about GLP1s and the next future versions acting on the same pathways. GLP1s are helping people to live longer, but they are solving a problem we ourselves created. They’re extending the lives we’ve shortened through sedentary lifestyle and processed foods. We set off a metabolic bombshell and GLP1s are the clean-up crew. We treat GLP1s with a generic, take as much as your body can handle. But the missing piece is that GLP1s are most beneficial when timed appropriately. This is a much larger topic around timing and dosage that I’ll be covering in a future post (don’t forget to subscribe), but there is also a way to manage the proper timing of GLP1s, coming up later in this post. Read-on.

Other Peptides : The success of GLP1s and popularity due to the weight loss effect has brought with it a wave of other peptides promising magical results. However, most of these peptides are currently light on evidence of effectiveness in humans. It is likely that some of these peptides will prove effective, some won’t, and like GLP1s and insulin (also a peptide), some will be effective in people who have diseases which are life threatening already. They are firmly in the hype cycle at the moment with Peptide Parties becoming the Tupperware Parties of the mid-2020s.

The Hope

The highly public and future potential in longevity rests on the idea that if we stop cells from aging, we’ll stay young forever. The hope is that by either stopping cell age, or turning our cells back to younger versions of themselves, we’ll be younger versions of ourselves, or at least return to the function of our younger selves.

Previously telomere lengthening was the golden child of this space. If we can just stop telomere’s from fraying or lengthen them after they have been shortened, the DNA will be better protected and we can live forever. Unfortunately, it seems most telomere research is now on hold. The risk profile of introducing cancer into the body was too great.

Then came stem-cells. If we just inject stem-cells into the body and turn them into the cells we want, we can just always update our hardware.

But thus far, stem-cells also haven’t turned out as promised, or are still in the pre-clinical phase, aside from a few instances where stem-cells are treating physical injuries.

Currently, the most promising area in bringing youth back to cells is through genetic re-programming. Altos Labs is in the discovery phase of how they can use Yamanka Factors to bring a cell back to it’s former highly functional un-aged state. As Hal Baron, CEO of Altos Labs states “[I]t may, one day, be possible to transform patients’ lives by reversing disease, injury and the disabilities that can occur throughout life.”

NewLimit is at a similar stage, and are focused on “restoring youthful function in the aging liver, immune, and vascular systems”. They describe their “20-year ambition is to significantly extend human healthspan”.

The Hidden Now

In any discussion on health and longevity, we will always hear the three pillars are diet, exercise, and sleep. What is mentioned less often is that the Neural Function of Sleep is a key driver of metabolic health, as well as impacting our ability to exercise and recover from exercise. Without sleep, the other two pillars can’t stand on their own.

Unfortunately, like our cells, the Neural Function of Sleep naturally declines with age. This isn’t sleep time, but the foundational processes that make sleep revitalizing. The emerging consensus is that the decline in the brain’s ability to repair during sleep is a vicious cycle which begins with impaired glymphatic flush. As metabolic waste gathers in the brain, the brain’s ability to remove new metabolic waste is impaired. This leads to more build-up, which further impairs removal. The grey matter atrophies and we see a decline in the size of grey matter itself.

But this challenge extends far outside the brain. This same vital processes of clearing the brain of waste are also involved in our daily metabolic health, and disrupting this activity reduces insulin response and delays GLP1 activity. Disrupting this activity reduces insulin response and delays GLP-1 activity, creating a biological ‘lag’ where your brain misses the signal to stop eating until it’s too late. By the time the signal arrives, you’ve already over-consumed.

In the exercise realm, 70% of growth hormone is released during the initial neural flush of slow-wave sleep. The impaired Neural Function which accompanies age is linked to our inability to recover well from exercise. Not only are we less able to recover, but the ability to push ourselves wile exercising is also impaired through our nervous system which creates the sensation of weakness resulting in the inability to recruit muscle activity and push our bodies to the required levels.

Cardiovascular health also suffers as blood pressure remains high, or in the worst cases actually increases. This leads to hypertension and coronary issues driven by total systemic inflexibility. In a healthy state, your arteries require the “dip” of deep sleep to maintain elasticity. Without it, they become stiff and lose their ability to adapt. This is a direct precursor to stroke and heart failure.

These failures in our metabolic, cardiovascular, and physical systems share a common origin in the degradation of our Neural Function of Sleep. A singular system with massive downstream affects.

For the past 5 and a half years, we’ve been developing technology to enhance the Neural Function of Sleep. This builds on a foundation of research in slow-wave enhancement which has shown that we can increase and measure a direct response in neural slow-wave function, and link this brain activity to improvements in glymphatic clearance[2], cardiovascular response[3,4], improve the markers of immune function[5].

Many studies are still underway, and some are focused on the potential in Alzheimer’s prevention or management of symptoms. Though what I find most interesting is if we can boost Neural Function prior to it’s natural decline can we slow or completely arrest the rate of decline?

If this were to happen, would we resolve many of the cardiovascular, metabolic, and cognitive issues which arise as we age? Can the beneficial results of exercise be maintained deep into old-age without adding exogenous hormones, peptides, or pharmaceuticals?

It would be naive not to address the fact that researchers struggled with getting the technology working consistently across subjects reliably. Our patent-pending Ultrasleep™ neurostimulation is designed to overcome these challenges faced in the research, and we previously wrote about how the challenges researchers had helped guide us to new methods of implementing our capabilities.

This isn’t a future hope that maybe this technology will work one day. We have developed the technology and had independent researchers validate our capabilities and now using Affectable Sleep in their own clinical trial. This is a product you can order today, and with shipments of initial units expected towards the end of Q2 2026.

Most people look at the work we are doing at Affectable Sleep as a means to help them get the revitalizing benefits of sleep without increasing sleep time. We are building for optimal function tomorrow, but we don’t lose sight of the fact that we believe we can have a greater impact on all the tomorrows that follow.

Find out more

Here at Affectable Sleep, we focus on enhancing the vital processes that happen during sleep that support your brain and body to function on the daily. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance Sleep’s Neural Function without altering sleep time. Affectable Sleep is pioneering a new type of wearable, that goes beyond harvesting our data and showing us pretty graphs, to directly affecting our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve our health in real-time.

Learn more at our website and follow our thinking and research on Linkedin

New research shows over time, our brain and body undergo “profound reprogramming.” Circadian rhythm doesn’t just affect how long it takes to fall asleep, or how long you sleep. In fact, it has a significant impact on the Neural Function of Sleep, the vital processes that make sleep rejuvenating. This reveals a gap in existing sleep solutions that don’t address this relationship.

Circadian rhythm plays a crucial role in our ability to sleep in one consolidated block of time at night and stay up for around 16 hours a day. The primary mediator of this is light. As the sun sets in the evening, this triggers our brain to produce melatonin, a hormone that induces sleepiness. Our core body temperature also drops, our alertness decreases. In the morning, as exposure to light increases, cortisol production increases, body temperature rises, promoting wakefulness.

Think of circadian rhythm as a conductor leading an orchestra. The conductor doesn’t play the instruments. They are responsible for the precise timing signals that enable the orchestra to perform to perfection. In your brain and body, these timing signals are sent through hormones (i.e. melatonin and cortisol).

The Neural Functions of Sleep are the orchestra. The key thing to note here is that the conductor tells the orchestra when to play. The orchestra does the work of creating the music, in this case performing the cascade of vital processes to restore you. Both are essential. When the conductor’s timing is off, the orchestra doesn’t perform well.

What disrupts the conductor

Irregular schedules, shift work and jet lag are all common disruptors to our circadian rhythm. These factors affect our natural light and dark exposure which are key levers for increasing our melatonin and dropping our cortisol, critical coordination signals for our brain and body’s conductor.

However, these disruptions aren’t the only threat. Age and disease contribute to a natural weakening of our circadian rhythm. When this happens, cortisol levels can remain at high levels while we’re asleep. Such hormonal imbalances impair Sleep’s Neural Function to operate effectively.

When brain cells rewrite their sheet music

Latest research shows that circadian disruption also occurs at the cellular level. This refers to the predictable patterns of activity within our brain cells. These biological rhythms explain why certain processes become more active at some times of the day and less active at others. In this study, they found over 2,100 genes within the brain that had their own rhythms.

When compared to aged and early Alzheimer’s tissue, many of these genes had lost their usual rhythms. In Alzheimer’s tissue, some of these genes even gained new rhythms that didn’t exist before in the healthy tissue. This demonstrates that the role of our circadian rhythm extends far beyond timing our sleep based on external cues (like changes in light exposure). It also affects the coordination of our brain’s vital processes, and when this coordination fails from ageing or disease, the Neural Function of Sleep is impaired.

Menopause provide another example of what happens when circadian function is dysregulated. According to recent research in Nature’s Women’s health, as women transition through menopause, hormonal changes can impact their circadian rhythm, leading to the sleep disruptions we typically see in this stage of life.

Collectively, this reveals a critical limitation in how sleep health is currently approached. The sleep industry almost exclusively focuses on behavioural interventions. Sleep trackers that focus on duration and achieving consistent bedtimes will not stop the natural weakening of our circadian rhythm.

Although we want to maintain circadian function as much as possible, we can also directly overcome this limitation by enhancing the Neural Function of Sleep. Researchers around the world have proven this is possible through neurostimulation, and it is exactly the type of breakthrough that moves beyond adjusting routines to direct measurable impact.

Find out more

Here at Affectable Sleep, we focus on enhancing the vital processes that happen during sleep that support your brain and body to function on the daily. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance Sleep’s Neural Function without altering sleep time. Affectable Sleep is pioneering a new type of wearable, that goes beyond harvesting our data and showing us pretty graphs, to directly affecting our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve our health in real-time.

Learn more at our website and follow our thinking and research on Linkedin

So why is this? Let’s look at what the latest in sleep science says, and does it really get to the bottom of what makes healthy sleep?

During sleep, our brain and body need to coordinate all the vital processes that allow for our daily function. From supporting your immune system and metabolism, to regulating your core body temperature and orchestrating when and what hormones get released. Sleep regularity creates predictable sleep-wake patterns that help create the conditions for this recovery to happen. When sleep timing is inconsistent, these processes don’t operate properly. This is why even when you feel like you’ve slept enough, you can still wake up unrefreshed.

Shift-workers struggle with the regular shift in their schedules and how it impacts their sleep and health. A study from 2021 showed that shift-workers who maintained a longer sleep time did not see improvements in daytime sleepiness. However, those who kept a consistent wake time saw improvements in cognitive function, even if it meant less sleep on some nights.

Now, the evidence has reached a new level. Recently, a groundbreaking study following 60,000 adults found that people with consistent sleep schedules had ~48% lower risk of dying than those with irregular schedules. They also had 16% lower cancer and 22% lower cardiometabolic mortality risk. Perhaps most importantly, when researchers compared sleep regularity and sleep duration head-to-head as predictors of mortality, regularity was clearly a better measure.

The crucial insight

Sleep regularity itself doesn’t improve your health. What regularity provides is the predictable schedule that the Neural Function of Sleep requires to operate properly. When you don’t have a consistent schedule, Sleep’s Neural Function decreases. The downstream effect on your brain and body can be detrimental, showing up across your metabolism, cardiovascular health, immune function, and cognitive performance, regardless of total sleep time.

The benefits of sleep are driven by the Neural Function of Sleep. This describes the complex interaction of hormones and vital processes within the brain which are responsible for controlling and driving the physical, mental and biological health of the body.

The takeaway here isn’t that regularity itself is the goal. It’s that regularity sets the stage for our brain and body’s ability to restore us every night, creating the right environment for optimal Neural Function to occur. The Neural Function of Sleep determines long-term health outcomes. This is why the mortality study found sleep regularity mattered more than duration. You can sleep for 16 hours, but if your Neural Function is impaired, your brain and body’s ability to recover take an immediate hit.

Crucially, this understanding is no longer niche. The sleep and health industries are already shifting beyond a fixation on time, increasingly recognising the impact of disrupted sleep regularity on long-term health. Even the American Heart Association now acknowledges that when sleep timing is irregular, it can negatively affect our cardiovascular and metabolic health. Recognising regularity is more important than duration is an important first step. While this ultimately points back to reframing sleep health around driving the Neural Function of Sleep, this shift urges us to look beyond schedules and consider how different lifestyles and life stages can impact these vital processes. Simply optimising these schedules or chasing more time in bed will only get us so far.

And yet, attaining a perfectly consistent schedule is practically impossible for many people. For the heroes of our society, namely shiftworkers and parents of young children, make up the millions of those who often don’t have control over their schedules. These groups of people deserve optimal health and given the Neural Function of Sleep is the foundation of health, current sleep solutions which revolve around duration have already failed them. Strengthening Sleep’s Neural Function directly contributes to effective recovery and rejuvenation, even when perfect schedules are not realistic.

Find out more

Here at Affectable Sleep, we focus on enhancing the vital processes that happen during sleep that support your brain and body to function on the daily. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance Sleep’s Neural Function without altering sleep time. Affectable Sleep is pioneering a new type of wearable, that goes beyond harvesting our data and showing us pretty graphs, to directly affecting our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve our health in real-time.

Learn more at our website and follow our thinking and research on Linkedin

This is the frustrating and useless advice every parent hears. It is useless not because you lack the desire, but because your life is defined by inconsistent wake-ups, shifted schedules, and the sheer unpredictability of parenting young children.

You follow the advice when you can, managing precious sleep time around your child’s needs. But the chaotic reality of parenting interferes with your sleep quality, leaving you feeling unrested and foggy, even given “enough” sleep time.

This exposes a fundamental flaw in how sleep health is measured. The sleep industry is obsessed with sleep duration, everything centered around how long you slept. But the reality is that the inconsistent schedule of parenting profoundly disrupts your system. Your internal clock demands a predictable schedule for the complex interplay of hormones and processes to drive adequate functional sleep.

Your energy is failing not because you missed an ideal hour count, but because of a deeper issue, namely the reduced quality of Neural Function of Sleep.

When your sleep is sporadic or inconsistent, pulled between a late night and an early start, or broken into uneven blocks, the quality of that work is compromised. This is why a broken 8 hours feels completely different from a great stretch of five hours. The duration might look sufficient on a tracker, but the true benefit is gone.

At Affectable Sleep, our entire approach is built on this critical distinction. Breaking away from an over-reliance on sleep time, leads us to focus on the processes which drive sleep health, and that help you wake up feeling revitalized and ready for your day.

This is why our work is focused on improving the Neural Function of Sleep. To relieve the sleep related pains experienced daily by parents of young children. Through improving the core function of sleep, without altering sleep time, making every precious minute optimally beneficial, we can resolve both the day-to-day tiredness which is a common challenge for parents, as well as positively impacting their health today and in the future.

Find out more

Here at Affectable Sleep, we focus on enhancing the vital processes that happen during sleep that support your brain and body to function on the daily. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance Sleep’s Neural Function without altering sleep time. Affectable Sleep is pioneering a new type of wearable, that goes beyond harvesting our data and showing us pretty graphs, to directly affecting our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve our health in real-time.

Learn more at our website and follow our thinking and research on Linkedin

We all understand what cardiovascular fitness is. We don’t have to describe all the individual measures of cardiovascular health, such as blood-pressure, V02-Max, heart-rate, HRV, etc. We have a single term which describes cardiovascular health.

We understand metabolic health, and know that it is more than just our diet, or insulin response. We don’t describe these things based on the individual measures, we have umbrella terms that describes the systems we are measuring or improving.

The current industry approach to sleep, focusing on how much time someone slept, or time spent in a sleep stage, has left us with more questions than answers. We know our sleep trackers don’t match our day-to-day experiences, and we don’t understand why.

We see the industry telling everyone they have to get “8 hours” of sleep, while a huge number of people who reach this “goal” are still asking “why do I feel tired all day”?

Sleep isn’t a score or a measure of time. It’s a complex interplay of hormones, neurotransmitters, and processes all co-ordinating to prepare your brain and body for high function the next day.

We refer to these processes as the Neural Function of Sleep. Though they can be measured, and logged individually, they operate as a system, and only through coordination can they provide optimal health.

Neural Function does not require any special tools. Just like cardiovascular fitness, and metabolic health are available to anyone who is focused and puts in the work.

Much like cardiovascular fitness, and metabolic health, as we age, sleeps neural function naturally declines.

Also like cardiovascular fitness, and metabolic health, we know that some people struggle with achieving the levels of neural function they desire. Often this is due to their lifestyle, such as having young children, or shiftwork, sometimes it is related to other health issues where sleep is secondarily impacted.

Understanding the Neural Function of Sleep allows us to stop obsessing over sleep duration. Instead we focus on the first order processes of sleep which are vital to health. We believe it is necessary to have this frame to measure and more importantly directly interact and enhance the processes which make sleep truly revitalizing.

Find out more

Here at Affectable Sleep, we focus on enhancing the vital processes that happen during sleep that support your brain and body to function on the daily. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance Sleep’s Neural Function without altering sleep time. Affectable Sleep is pioneering a new type of wearable, that goes beyond harvesting our data and showing us pretty graphs, to directly affecting our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve our health in real-time.

Learn more at our website and follow our thinking and research on Linkedin

I’ve been told by mothers that they experience the wired but tired feeling. They’re feeling like they’re always “on-edge” and even when they sleep, they feel like they’re only half asleep, as if they’re always partially conscious ready to satisfy their children’s needs.‍

Some researchers suggest this may be related to cortisol levels, particularly post-nursing, and an evolutionary throwback to the days when we needed to be aware of the dangers lurking in the wilderness that may be a threat to our children.‍

What mother’s are experiencing isn’t the lack of sleep time, it is the decrease in the Neural Function of Sleep.‍

In earlier generations, mothers gave birth in their 20s and potentially into their 30s, but the recent trend in many countries is for parenting to begin much later in life, allowing women to focus on their careers in their 20s and 30s and just barely sneak in a child or two in their late 30s and early 40s.‍

When childrearing was done earlier in life, women would experience the decline of sleep, and it would last for a few years, but then they would recover and get their “regular” sleep back.

Now that women are having children later in life, delayed maternity means the decrease in sleep function related to parenthood has begun to overlap with perimenopause. Mothers now say they never “recovered” from poor sleep after having children.

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Is it any wonder why women are demanding a solution to help their sleep needs?

Though HRT improves many of the symptoms of perimenopause and post-menopause, sleep remains the #1 complaint.

We were yet to understand how or if Affectable’s Ultrasleep stimulation could benefit women’s pre and post menopausal sleep challenges. We were incredibly fortunate that a commenter on Reddit had access to a more rudimentary version of our technology during her perimenopause years, and she said the difference was “night and day” and it was the only thing that helped, and she hasn’t been able to find anything remotely close since.

This is why we created Affectable Sleep. It’s for these groups of people for whom adding more sleep isn’t an option, or isn’t even answering the right question.
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There is no reason to continue to suffer if we can enhance the Neural Function of Sleep without increasing or altering sleep time.

If you, or someone you know, has experienced slow-wave enhancement during childrearing or perimenopause, we’d love to hear your story. Tag us on instagram @affectablesleep or post on our reddit page.
Those experiences are what guide us as we build the future of truly revitalizing sleep.

Further Reading/Sources

‍Long-term effects of pregnancy and childbirth on sleep satisfaction and duration of first-time and experienced mothers and fathers

Sleep During the Perimenopause: A SWAN Story

Find out more

Here at Affectable Sleep, we focus on enhancing the vital processes that happen during sleep that support your brain and body to function on the daily. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance Sleep’s Neural Function without altering sleep time. Affectable Sleep is pioneering a new type of wearable, that goes beyond harvesting our data and showing us pretty graphs, to directly affecting our biology, physiology, and neurophysiology to improve our health in real-time.

Learn more at our website and follow our thinking and research on Linkedin

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Before CBT-I, someone may spend 8 hours in bed and sleep 6 of those hours.

After CBT-I, someone may spend 6.5 hours in bed and sleep 6 of those hours.

In both cases, the total sleep time remains the same, but we see an improvement on sleep efficiency, essentially less time lying awake in bed.

Dr. Amelia Scott, a clinical psychologist from the Woolcock Institute recently highlighted, “people end up only getting a little more sleep” after treatment. She has pulled back the veil and and spoken openly about what CBT-I can and cannot help with. In doing so, she brings attention to the sleep industry’s obsession with duration and how, as Dr. Scott puts it, “kicks the recovery can down the road” when we make it the be-all-end-all to one’s sleep problems.

Sleep isn’t about time, it’s about Neural Function. This is our brain and body’s ability to execute the processes that are vital for our daily function. This includes flushing out metabolic waste, memory consolidation, supporting our immune system, just to name a few.

We agree that for people who have difficulty falling asleep, CBT-I can help.

But its effectiveness doesn’t change the larger truth. Sleep duration doesn’t magically increase the Neural Function of Sleep.

So perhaps instead of judging our sleep based on sleep time, we should actually question if our sleep is consistently rejuvinating.

This is the very crux of what we are building here at Affectable Sleep. We’ve spent the last 5 years developing neurotechnology to enhance the Neural Function of Sleep, without altering sleep time. There is a change coming to the sleep industry, and breaking the over-reliance on sleep duration as the primary lever and measure of sleep quality.

We’ll be revealing more in the coming weeks, as the latest in sleep research challenges how the industry is thinking about the future of sleep, health, and longevity.

The scoring criteria for slow-wave sleep is characterised by a fixed threshold. This threshold can be traced back to a manual published by Rechtschaffen and Kales in the 1960s. What was established more than 60 years ago, was drawn from a sample of 33 participants who were predominantly 20-30 year old males. This has now perpetuated across sleep science and into the algorithms of sleep trackers today.

Recently, two reports from an academic journal by Dr. Shaun Davidson and Monika Haack have highlighted this oversight: applying scoring thresholds based on this young male “average” does not represent the sleep characteristics of women or anyone outside of that small subset.

People are chasing sleep scores based on a set of criteria that does not suit them.

These measures of sleep time permeate the wearable tech market. However, time based measures of sleep not only fail to represent what actually makes sleep beneficial, but they provide little benefit to users.

The industry is reaching an inflection point as the attitude towards the measure of sleep time is changing. Forward thinking companies are recognising that improving sleep doesn’t lie in providing more data, but rather in tools that actively enhance the function of the brain and body during sleep.

Sydney, Australia based start-up Affectable Sleep is leading this charge. They’ve developed neurostimulation technology that directly enhances Sleep’s Neural Function. Instead of measuring sleep against outdated metrics. They stand out from the growing wave of sleep trackers by focusing on enhancing the brain and body’s ability to recover during sleep.

Affectable Sleep has overcome the challenges that held back previous attempts to make slow-wave enhancement accessible outside the lab. With patent-pending technology, the company has packaged the breakthrough in a consumer-ready product that delivers UltraSleep™, targeted neurostimulation to enhance the Neural Function of Sleep.

But is it really that simple? Can one lost hour cause all that damage?
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The statistics may be accurate in parts, but the explanation is wrong. Car crashes don’t spike on Sunday when the clocks shift. They rise through the week that follows, with Monday often higher. Studies show fatal crashes increase by about six percent during that week. More commuters face darker mornings, and darkness itself raises risk on the road. The reason is somewhat simpler than just a single lost hour.

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So that explains road accidents. But what about heart attacks and strokes, which some studies show increase right after the clocks change? How could losing an hour of sleep on Saturday night lead to more deaths on Monday?

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The first thing to understand is that heart attacks already show a Monday pattern in some datasets, driven by work stress and lifestyle. Recent data is not conclusive that heart attacks or strokes always increase after the clocks change. However, advanced modelling now suggests that obesity and stroke risk increase over the entire period of daylight savings. It isn’t one night of lost sleep, but an ongoing shift that changes how our bodies function.

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The real story isn’t about one night. Daylight savings shifts the relationship between the body and the sun for months.

Circadian rhythm, the internal clock that coordinates sleep, regulates metabolism, blood pressure, immune function, and hormone release. When the clock is pushed out of sync, those processes lose their natural timing. That misalignment doesn’t fix itself in a day. For months, millions of people live slightly out of step with the solar day.

When circadian rhythm is misaligned, The Neural Function of Sleep is impaired. Sleep is still happening, but it’s less efficient at doing its job. That means slower immune recovery, greater cardiovascular strain, and the kind of brain fog most of us blame on “not enough hours.”

Neural Function is the combined work the brain and body do across the night, repairing tissues, regulating hormones, clearing waste, strengthening memory, and balancing the immune system. When this function is disrupted, the hours we spend asleep lose much of their value. We can still clock the “right” number of hours, but wake up less healthy than we should.

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Though circadian rhythm is a familiar part of the sleep story, the role of Neural Function is only beginning to be widely recognised. Researchers are showing that it isn’t just how long we sleep or when we sleep that matters, but whether our sleep is actually performing its repair work. That shift in focus changes how we think about sleep and health altogether.

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Researchers are now linking daylight savings to long-term health problems like obesity and stroke. Not because of one lost hour, but because months of misalignment blunt sleep’s Neural Function and directly destabilise other body systems.

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As Australia prepares for daylight savings on Sunday, and the US Congress debates whether to abolish it altogether, researchers worldwide have spent the last decade investigating methods to increase Neural Function independent of sleep time. Australia is at the forefront, with Monash University and Sydney’s Woolcock Institute recognised as global leaders. We’ve spent the past few years building on this science at Affectable Sleep, and we’re now months away from releasing this technology to directly enhance sleep’s Neural Function.

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We took these comments very seriously. We had yet to commit ourselves down this path, and were investigating different types of sleep stimulation, and potentially other ways to improve sleep, but we kept coming back to this one known method, which, we believed, had the greatest intersection of quality peer-reviewed research and impact.

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My co-founder and I had been engineers at CSIRO, and I recall my boss telling me that researchers always think that when their work is done, the research is complete and the end result is what becomes the product or service. He said, it never works that way. After the research is done, it’s the engineers who make it actually work.

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Rather than just cherry-pick research which fits our beliefs, we post all the research we are aware of on our website.

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A redditor took the time to dive deep into the research, and asked “the results seem inconclusive”. Rather than cherry-picking only the most positive results, we review the entire body of research. It’s the opposite of cherry-picking, and it’s the only way to learn from both successes and failures, so we can engineer a system that works reliably across people and environments.

1. When a Null result isn’t a negative
   At first glance, I was disappointed by a study reporting no increase in growth hormone during slow-wave enhancement[1]. Then I saw that the study was conducted only in healthy men aged 18–24. These participants were already in the peak years of GH production. How much higher could their levels reasonably go? Probably not what I’d call a negative result.
   An equally puzzling study showed the enhancing slow-waves did not improve metabolic function in healthy older men[2]. If someone is metabolically healthy, how would we even judge improved metabolic function?
   

2. Rudimentary protocols
   When I first reviewed some of these studies, they clearly challenged the premise that slow-wave enhancement was possible. On the surface some of them seemed very similar to other studies which showed a positive result, but on closer examination, and time reading through multiple studies, a pattern emerged.
   
   The most obvious issue was volume control. Stimulation volume was fixed either to a specific decibel level[3][4], or to a personalized level when the user was awake[5]. One of the most important pieces of properly implementing slow-wave enhancement is to adapt the volume in real-time. If the volume is too low, the brain will ignore or not even register the sound. Too loud, and the participant is aroused from sleep, defeating the purpose and actually harming their sleep. When a pre-determined volume is selected, either or both of these outcomes are possible within a single night. In contrast, adaptive protocols adjust volume dynamically, ensuring the stimulation is neither too faint nor disruptive.
   
   Once I noticed this trend in a few studies, I also noticed even more rudimentary protocols, such as measuring a slow-wave and providing stimulation at a fixed interval[4][6]. This is not responding and interacting with the brain in real-time. It’s a rough approximation that hopes the stimulation will land at the right time, not a true closed-loop protocol.
   
   However, within this segment of rudimentary protocols, there are more interesting studies which are a part of the puzzle. They show responses in some participants, but not in others. and some even divided by age, noting that younger participants responded better, or in other studies with slightly different protocols, older participants had improved response[7]. It should be noted, older participants have lower slow-wave activity, so there is a greater opportunity to increase their stimulation response. This was a huge hint to us as to how to develop a more robust system to get results across a wider audience.
   
   This class of research shows how vital real-time adaptation is, and points the way toward improving response.
   

3. Dosage
   This one we noticed in our early testing days, and was clearly stated in a recent Alzheimer’s study[8] as the fault which prevented participants from achieving a positive result. Slow-wave enhancement is regularly performed in an on-off process within the same night. Not every opportunity to stimulate is taken advantage of. However, missing a significant number of stimulation opportunities reduces the effectiveness of stimulation. It’s like getting a minor dose of a drug, not enough to show a difference from no stimulation at all. The dose makes the poison, and missing blocks of stimulation hampers any benefits, and in this Alzheimer’s-focused study, some participants got no stimulation at all, even though the EEG data captured by the researchers clearly showed stimulation opportunity.
   

I do find it interesting that null results in research are often not published, and I’m thankful that studies showing null results in slow-wave enhancement have been published. It is through the maze of understanding what worked, what didn’t, and under what circumstances that we were able to design our patent-pending Ultrasleep™ stimulation protocol.

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That’s why we don’t cherry-pick results. We review the positive, the negative, and the null, because only then can you see the real patterns. We’re not the researchers, we’re the engineers who make research insights work in the real world.

1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02170-3

2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2018.08.028

3. https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsac155

4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2021.107482

5. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsle.2023.1294957

6. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0306-19.2019

7. https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsz315

8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2024.07.002

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This approach has led to consumer frustration as users are inundated with numbers; sleep scores, heart rate variability, the percentage of time spent in each sleep stage, the list goes on. This obsession with data fuels sleep anxiety as we fall into this cyclical trap of pleasing our wearable.

The core problem is that even with all these “insights” and data, we are still reaching the same conclusion. How much time do you spend sleeping? What time did you go to bed? What time did you wake up? But sleep is much more than just time. It is about the restorative function of your brain and body which makes sleep truly revitalizing.

Affectable Sleep, a Sydney-based startup is pioneering a new approach to functional sleep health. The company’s patent-pending neurostimulation technology, UltraSleep™, enhances sleep’s restorative function without altering sleep time. Delivered through a sleek and thin wearable, Affectable Sleep has made cutting-edge research available to consumers. Pre-orders opened in August, and demand quickly exhausted the initial discounted pricing tiers. The company will begin shipping the headband in early 2026.

Affectable Pty Ltd is a wearable technology company based in Sydney, Australia. The company is developing consumer neurotechnology that enhances sleep’s restorative function. Its first product, Affectable Sleep, delivers UltraSleep™ through patent-pending technology packaged in a lightweight sleep wearable.

https://affectablesleep.com

contact press@affectables.com

A small selection of sources. More than 50 published peer-reviewed studies available at https://www.affectablesleep.com/how-it-works

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Researchers have found reliable ways to amplify the brain’s most restorative functions during sleep. The discovery challenges the long-held belief that the only path to better sleep is spending more hours in bed.

Scientists have been pursuing this goal for decades, and in the 1960s, researchers postulated that external stimulation could influence brain activity during sleep. Over the years, electrical currents and magnetic fields were tested, but the breakthrough came with precisely timed micro-pulses of sound, often referred to as phase-targeted auditory stimulation (PTAS).

By delivering PTAS at the right instant, scientists discovered they could increase delta activity, the synchronous firing of neurons that underpins the restorative function of sleep. This finding has reshaped how researchers think about what defines healthy sleep function.

In the past decade, research institutions across the US, Europe, and Australia have demonstrated powerful effects of this technology. PTAS has been shown to improve cognitive function[1,2], boost heart rate variability[3], and increase immune system response[4], among other benefits. Together, these results suggest that enhancing delta activity during sleep may be one of the most important frontiers in sleep science.

Now, a Sydney-based startup has created a sleep wearable that builds directly on this body of research. Affectable Sleep has overcome the challenges that held back previous attempts to make slow-wave enhancement accessible outside the lab. With patent-pending technology, the company has packaged the breakthrough in a consumer-ready product that delivers UltraSleep™, with the goal of enhancing sleep’s restorative function. Pre-orders opened in August, and demand quickly exhausted the initial discounted pricing tiers. First units are expected to ship in early 2026.

Affectable Pty Ltd is a wearable technology company based in Sydney, Australia. The company is developing consumer neurotechnology that enhances sleep’s restorative function. Its first product, Affectable Sleep, delivers UltraSleep™ through patent-pending technology packaged in a lightweight sleep wearable.

https://affectablesleep.com

contact press@affectables.com

A small selection of sources. More than 50 published peer-reviewed studies available at https://www.affectablesleep.com/how-it-works

[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.13385
[2] https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afad228
[3] https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.13545
[4] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02170-3

Often “deeper sleep” is used to reference less night time awakenings. “More restorative sleep” is maybe sometimes measured by more time in deep sleep, but if you’ve been paying attention to what we’re doing here at Affectable Sleep, that time isn’t the point. After all, you wouldn’t measure your diet based on how much time you spend chewing, would you?

At Affectable we’re focused on Neural Function of Sleep. The physiological work your brain and body do during sleep providing the necessary recovery and repair for optimal health. But why do we talk about Neural Function as a category and not the individual markers which make up this vital component of life?

A recent thread on LinkedIn shows how easy it is to go down a rabbit hole of data that make up the Neural Function of Sleep. Spectral activity, delta power, odds ratio product, frequency bands, that’s before we get into sleep spindles and k-complexes, and the like.

While many people still struggle to understand the difference and value between deep sleep and REM sleep, introducing these highly technical measures of sleep would just add to the confusion.

There are enough sleep products on the market that just try to measure your sleep and give you a score, or try to get you to fall asleep faster, or sleep longer, with the thinking that more sleep is better health.
These sleep scores, charts, and metrics don’t always reflect what actually matters and they can confuse more than they clarify.

Sadly, Apple added to this confusion when they rebranded light sleep as “core sleep” to make it sound less…unimportant. But renaming it doesn’t change it’s role or limitations.

I will give Apple credit though, when they first released the Apple watch, they didn’t provide the usual hypnogram. Though these charts may look impressive, they are not very digestible. They give us data but then leave it us to interpret what it means.

At Affectable Sleep, we’re taking a different approach. We increase the Neural Function of Sleep without altering sleep time. We’ve built the world’s thinnest, lightest, and most comfortable EEG headband, we could absolutely drown you in data about your brain activity during sleep. But what value do you get from having this information. The Neural Function of Sleep isn’t just about the immediate brain response to the stimulation. It kicks off a cascade of hormones regulating everything from your immune system, metabolic function, and cardiovascular response. It primes your nervous system, moderates inflammation, consolidates memory, and so much more.

Enhancing the Neural Function of Sleep isn’t influencing one thing, it’s the culmination of all of your bodies health systems that are responsible for managing your health and wellbeing through the activity of most of the bodies organs which are all accessible through real-time neurostimulation during sleep. That’s what enhancing Neural Function is all about. Not more sleep time, not falling asleep faster, or sleeping “deeper” but enhancing the neurological, biological, and physiological functions that make sleep valuable, and without which, we would die.

That’s why we focus on the Neural Function of Sleep. We think this is a middle ground between the fluffy jargon of “deeper sleep” and the overloading of data points.
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We’re not here to judge your sleep, our mission is to directly enhance the functions of sleep, so you can live a better and healthier life tomorrow and all the tomorrows that follow.

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That’s how much of the media reported these studies anyway, but what the study actually said was that if you sleep more than 8 hours AND have “Excessive Daytime Sleepiness”.

That Excessive Daytime Sleepiness is a clue! It suggests that this cohort of people are not getting adequate restorative function of sleep. Even when they are sleeping for extended periods of time, they are not reaping the health benefits sleep provides. Potentially the reason they are sleeping longer is simply because their restorative function is impaired, which results in the excessive sleepiness.

The world is so caught up on sleep time, the message we get is “sleeping to much is bad for your health!”

It’s time for the us, and particularly the scientific community, to move beyond simple measure of sleep duration in order to gauge health and measure outcomes. It’s a significantly flawed model, and we see researchers regularly try to adapt their reasoning to time based inputs rather than the functional aspects of sleep.

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But what does this mean for you? First off, at Affectable Sleep, we’re not the sleep police. We’re not going to tell you how long you should sleep. We believe this is a highly flawed approach to thinking about sleep.

There isn’t one diet that is right for everyone, or one exercise regimen that works for everyone. Why would sleep be any different? You need to figure out the sleep that is right for you, and the sleep that fits into your lifestyle.

Part of that can and should be based on how you feel, but we can’t ignore that lifestyle plays a considerable role. You should be eating well, and getting exercise, and both of these will improve the natural restorative function of sleep.

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When your lifestyle doesn’t or can’t support your restorative function, that’s where we come in. Affectable Sleep enhances the restorative function of your sleep, without altering sleep time. We’ve seen this in studies where sleep is restricted, but the health markers of sleep are improved through enhancing restorative function.

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After five years of studying sleep and refining our technology, we’re preparing to launch our pre-sale in the coming days. Our goal is to enhance the restorative function of your sleep so you can experience the full health benefits that quality sleep provides. If you want to be among the first to be notified when our pre-sale opens, join our waitlist today!

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The very next day, I came across this article from Android Police about the new Samsung wearable ring, and I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about the feature which adjusts your air conditioning based on data from the ring. Though I’m not sure how effective this will be, as I’m not sure room temperature adapts quickly enough to your body’s needs, but it could learn over time what you need, and then adapt on a schedule accordingly.

The point is, almost nobody is talking about this feature which is FINALLY taking the device that most people think is all about gathering stats, and turning it into a device that is actively altering your environment to improve sleep.

It’s no surprise that sleep trackers have become so common. The availability of inexpensive components has made it easy to throw sensors into a wearable device and show some data in an app. But just because it is cheap to collect sleep data does not mean the data itself is valuable, or useful to the person wearing the device.

We have written before about what sleep trackers get wrong about sleep. One of the biggest risks is something called orthosomnia, where people make their sleep worse by just trying to chase a higher score on their sleep tracker.

It is encouraging to see Samsung move beyond tracking to actively adjusting your sleep environment. It shows that the industry is starting to recognize that measurement alone is not enough.

After getting a sleep tracker, and looking at my scores night after night, I realized that having more data wasn’t helping me. Even before I understood that measuring sleep by time is not a valuable metric, it was even more obvious to that we shouldn’t just be tracking our health, we are on the cusp of having the technology for our wearables to directly intervene and interact with our environment and our physiology to improve our health and wellbeing.

It sounds crazy to think we’d put something in our house that would measure the health of our environment but not change it, why does doing the same thing to our physiology not seem equally outrageous?

It’s why we called our company Affectable, next generation wearables go beyond just measuring our biomarkers to actively altering our physiology, biology, or neurology on our behalf. They are wearables that affect our health. Affectables.

At Affectable, we believe this is just the start, for the last 5 years we’ve been developing technology to directly enhance the restorative function of sleep, not just measure how long you’ve slept.

Our headband monitors your brain activity in real-time and our patent-pending auditory stimulation enhances the restorative function of sleep, without altering sleep time. We’re not giving you stats on how long you slept, we’re taking action while you sleep, so you get the most benefit out of every minute.

Join on our waitlist and you’ll get the first to get the opportunity to purchase our Affectable Sleep headband, and will get some early sneak peaks at what we’ve been building.

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One sleepless night, I thought “I didn’t care if I slept, I just didn’t want to be tired anymore”, and that thought led me to do a deep dive into the latest in sleep science, but what I found was disappointing. Mostly, just the same old sleep hygiene recommendations I’d heard when I was a kid. There has to be more to it! How have people been struggling with sleep for decades and the best we can come up with is “get more sleep”?

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It took me a LONG time to break out of the idea that more sleep time meant better sleep. The 8 hour rule has been beaten into us. It’s a myth that refuses to die.

So I thought I’d back up and take a look at sleep from a first principles approach. As much as I can anyway. There is still so much we don’t know about sleep, but what we do know, I believe, leads us to a very different path than the one the sleep industry follows, and refuses to give up on.

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Every animal with a brain has to sleep. It’s been said that there is no way that evolution would have kept sleep as a requirement if it wasn’t absolutely vital to life. For many animals it’s just too dangerous to lose consciousness for an extended period of time. For example, dolphins would drown if they didn’t come up for air, so they sleep with only ½ of their brain at a time. Other animals would become easy prey if they slept, so they only have a very short sleep opportunity. Lions, being the top of the food chain, have little concern for when and how they sleep, and evolution has left them with regular naps throughout the day.

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But right there we see the problem. Even I’m referring to sleep by time, when I’m trying to look from a first principles perspective.

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For a long time, weight was treated as a primary indicator of health. Not because it was the best measure, but because it was easy to collect, and generally useful at identifying outliers. If someone was severely underweight or morbidly obese, you could safely assume there was a health issue.

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But for most people, weight alone doesn’t say much. It doesn’t tell you how someone feels, how well their body is functioning, or how their systems are holding up over time. It doesn’t tell you about stress, recovery, immune function, or resilience.

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We’ve been measuring it by time, not because time is the right variable, but because it’s the one we can see. And like weight, it tells us something at the extremes. But for most people, minutes asleep isn’t what determines how well sleep is working.

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The primary restorative function of sleep is deep sleep, or slow-wave sleep, which again, is often measured by time, but slow-wave sleep isn’t time based. A slow-wave is the synchronous firing of neurons which are the foundation of health. This precise brain activity is part of the vital restorative processes that occur during sleep, and slow-waves in particular are tied to the flushing of metabolic waste from the brain, they kick-off a cascade of hormonal responses, they prime the immune system, and it is a time when memories are encoded and stored.

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Deep sleep can be very restorative, if your neurons are firing well, and those processes complete successfully, it’s hugely valuable sleep. However, the same “deep sleep” can just as easily have less functional restoration, with lower delta power, when the brain is less capable of repair. You’ve likely felt this after drinking alcohol. You may have had deep sleep, but the restorative function was impaired. As we age, the effectiveness of slow-wave repair declines even if we’re getting an appropriate amount of “time” in deep sleep.

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Spindle activity is another process tied to memory. These are short bursts of brain activity that seem to help transfer memories into long-term storage. The more spindles you have, the better your memory consolidation tends to be. And unlike deep sleep, we don’t measure this by time. You don’t track minutes of spindles. You count them like dollar bills, not minutes in a bank account.

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K-complexes are large electrical bursts that seem to help your brain stay asleep while still monitoring your environment. They often occur when there’s noise or movement nearby, acting like a gatekeeper. Most of the time, the brain hears something and says, “that’s not important, keep sleeping.” But sometimes, especially in light sleepers, k-complexes are followed by waking. It’s the brain deciding it needs to bring you back to awareness.

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REM sleep plays a key role in emotional processing and social understanding. There are a few interesting things happening here. The visual dreaming involves replaying, in various guises, the activity we’ve seen before, which primes us to respond appropriately in the future. It’s a kind of rehearsal for how we’ll respond next time.

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Another interesting theory is that we visualize dreams because it is the only sense which is essentially turned off for nearly ⅓ of our lives, and visualizing our dreams prevents the brain from re-wiring the visual neurons to be used for another purpose due to their lack of active use.

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Those are some of the key processes involved in the brain of healthy sleep, as we understand them today.

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There are also disrupters like alpha-intrusion where wake-like brain activity slips into deep sleep. You’re unconscious, but part of your brain is acting like it’s still on duty. This kind of fragmentation reduces how well slow-waves do their job, and it’s one of the reasons people can sleep for hours and still feel like they never really got restorative sleep. Your sleep tracker, and anything measuring time may still view this as deep sleep, but it was functionally weakened.

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We focus on the brain because what happens there drives almost everything else. The brain’s activity during sleep triggers hormonal shifts, immune activity, and nervous system recovery. In poor sleepers, or those who for some reason don’t have proper restorative function, the sympathetic nervous system can remain active, resulting in poor cardiovascular recovery, and other hallmarks of stress, or even the sensation of stress.

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In all of the above processes around sleep, we haven’t really had to touch on time too much. These processes unfold over time, but time isn’t what defines them.

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Rather than asking “how long was I asleep for?” we should be asking “did my sleep meet my restorative needs?”

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Rather than a time-based model of sleep, we’re focused on enhancing the restorative function of sleep. This is functional sleep health.

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If you’re ready to stop measuring sleep by the clock, and start enhancing the restorative function of sleep, join the waitlist and be the first to experience what functional sleep health can really mean.

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It’s Giving Gold Stars for Showing Up, Not Mastering the Material

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Sleep trackers are suckers for consistency. Same bedtime, same hours, same routine? Top marks. I recently had a night with just 5-hours of sleep, but a big chunk of deep sleep, 40% more than my usual. I felt great, but my tracker docked me points for not hitting 7-8 hours.
It’s like a teacher rewarding you for sitting at your desk on time, ignoring whether you actually learned the material at all.

Bryan Johnson loves to brags about his “perfect” Whoop scores (among other things. But the 100 score is the result of his robotic schedule: lights out at 8:30 PM, up at 5 AM, every day. Trackers love that predictability. But if someone lands deep, restorative sleep in less time? Penalized. The score’s about sticking to the clock, not how much recovery happened.

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It Skips the Real Story of Your Night

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Trackers count minutes in deep sleep or REM, but they’re blind to why you slept that way. A study that restricted deep sleep without altering total sleep time found amyloid-beta levels in the brain jumped 10% in one night[1]. That’s a sign restoration faltered, not because of hours, but because of what sleep delivered. Trackers miss that. Not all deep sleep is the same, the important part is how much restorative function occurs during that time, not how much time the restorative function took place in.

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It Turns You Into Your Own Skeptic

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When the tracker’s off, who gets the blame? Too often, it’s you. People start thinking, “Guess I should feel tired,” even when they don’t, or “Maybe I’m wrong about feeling off,” after a glowing report. Why does your gadget’s word outweighs your own sense of yourself.

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It’s Obsessed With Yesterday, Not Today

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Your tracker’s all about last night’s recap. “Did you sleep enough”, Did you wake up too much”, etc. etc. Fine, that’s what happened. It’s a detailed autopsy of a night you can’t change, with no clue about what it means for you right now. Over weeks, a pattern might hint at something useful, but this daily breakdown? It’s like telling you yesterdays weather. A bit late to get the umbrella now, isn’t it? Fixating on the past isn’t helpful, which is why at Affectable Sleep, we’re optimizing sleep in real time. We’re not waiting to tell you “that could’ve been better”, we’re making sure the sleep you get is as powerful and restorative as it can be, so you wake up knowing you’ve done the best you could.

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Sleep’s More Than Just a Stat Sheet

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Trackers lean on averages, 8-hour targets, textbook sleep cycles, but you’re not average. Nobody is. The magic of sleep isn’t in matching a time based formula, it’s about the physiological and neurological processes that happen through the night. . At Affectable Sleep, we’re here to amplify the restorative power of the sleep you get. No chasing stats or tweaking schedules, just real enhancement of the vital functions of sleep.

If you’re done chasing gold stars or second-guessing yourself over a tracker’s verdict, maybe it’s time for a new approach. Join our waitlist. Let’s make your sleep work smarter, not just longer.

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I’ve been sleep deprived for a while. How much long-term damage did I do?

We’ve all had the odd sleepless night, whether it’s work related or a big night out, that’s part of living a full life. But extended sleep deprivation risks lasting harm. The glymphatic system acts like the brain’s waste removal service, clearing metabolic waste such as amyloid-beta during deep sleep. This process relies on slow-wave sleep, when cerebrospinal fluid flushes through the brain, removing toxins that build up while you’re awake. When your body lacks quality sleep, this clearance weakens, leaving waste behind. A study found that disrupting deep sleep in healthy adults increased amyloid-beta levels in cerebrospinal fluid by about 10 percent in a single night [1]. It might be fine if one bad night was the end of it, but the problem compounds. It is theorized that increased amyloid-beta further impairs the glymphatic flush, meaning the brain struggles even more to clear waste on following nights. It’s a vicious cycle that may take years to manifest, potentially contributing to Alzheimer’s risk, as noted in research showing that higher amyloid levels predict cognitive decline in healthy adults over 3 years [2].

I’ve been focusing on the effects of sleep deprivation, but in the study I mentioned above, the damage to the glymphatic system and buildup of metabolic waste didn’t come from sleep deprivation in the traditional sense. Researchers hindered deep sleep without altering total sleep time, showing that poor sleep quality, even with enough hours, can have effects similar to sleep deprivation [1]. This matters because damage isn’t just from missing sleep—it’s about not getting the necessary restorative brain function, irrespective of time.

Research has shown that using acoustic stimulation during slow-wave sleep can improve memory performance and produce a beneficial amyloid response in older adults [3]. These improvements in memory lasted beyond the stimulation period, suggesting that enhancing slow-wave activity may help break the cycle between poor sleep and brain health decline. This shows how our understanding of the brain is evolving and how processes like slow-wave enhancement can support the brain’s restorative function during sleep.

Does this mean there are no consequences to extended sleep deprivation? No. That’s like saying obesity doesn’t matter because we can take Ozempic later to fix it. We now have tools to optimize our brain’s restorative function, but they don’t replace our duty to care for our health with consistent quality sleep.

References:
[1] Ju, Y. E., et al. (2017). Slow wave sleep disruption increases cerebrospinal fluid amyloid-β levels. Brain. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awx148.
[2] Donohue, M. C., et al. (2017). Association Between Elevated Brain Amyloid and Subsequent Cognitive Decline Among Cognitively Normal Persons. JAMA. DOI: 10.1001/jama.2017.6669.
[3] Wunderlin, M., et al. (2023). Acoustic stimulation during sleep predicts long-lasting increases in memory performance and beneficial amyloid response in older adults. Age and Ageing. DOI: 10.1093/ageing/afad228.

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I regularly feel tired, even after 8 hours of sleep, but I don’t know why.

You’ve been told that 8 hours of sleep should leave you refreshed, so why are you still dragging through your day? When I talk to people about this, one issue often stands out: an irregular sleep schedule. Your body craves consistency, and erratic bedtimes can disrupt the natural rhythm of your sleep cycles, leaving you unrested even after a full night of sleep.

When I first heard about sleep hygiene, I thought it was nonsense. Why would a consistent bedtime change how my body slept? But then I started comparing it to our daily diet and eating schedule, and it clicked. If you eat lunch at noon every day and suddenly skip it, your body notices—you feel hungry because it expects food at that time. Sleep works the same way. A regular bedtime trains your body to lower cortisol, the stress hormone that keeps you alert, and increase adenosine, a chemical that signals it’s time to rest. An inconsistent schedule throws this off. Your body doesn’t know what hormones to ramp up or reduce when because you’re causing it to guess when you might be going to sleep. Erratic sleep timing doesn’t just impact your ability to fall asleep, it alter slow-wave sleep effectiveness, even if you get a full 8 hours[5]!

Feeling tired after 8 hours often means your brain and body are achieving the restorative processes necessary for optimal health. It’s a signal of what your body needs. Enhancing slow-wave activity can help, ensuring the sleep you get is as effective as possible. Slow-wave enhancement has been shown to improved heart rate variability, a marker of autonomic balance and overall health[6].

But what if you have an erratic schedule? If you’re a shift worker, for example, maintaining a consistent bedtime can feel impossible. Research has pointed to wake time being more important than total sleep hours when measuring subjective tiredness and cognitive function, like attention and memory [7]. This further shows that it’s not just about how long you sleep, but the cyclical patterns and restorative function that are vital for feeling refreshed.

References:
[5] Van Der Werf, Y. D., et al. (2017). The impact of irregular head-start times on weekly rhythms of slow-wave and REM sleep. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-03171-4.
[6] Diep, C., et al. (2021). Acoustic enhancement of slow wave sleep on consecutive nights improves autonomic functioning measured via heart rate variability. Journal of Sleep Research. DOI: 10.1111/jsr.13289.
[7] Kim, J. K., et al. (2020). Quantifying Cognitive Impairment After Sleep Deprivation at Different Times of Day: A Proof of Concept Using Ultra-Short Smartphone-Based Tests. Sleep Medicine Reports. DOI: 10.1016/j.sleepx.2020.100025.

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How long after having my child will it take to recover my sleep?

New mothers often wonder when sleep will feel restorative and rejuvenating again. The demands of motherhood, like frequent night wakings and the stress of caring for a young child, can fragment sleep for years. Research shows that poor sleep quality in new mothers is linked to higher stress levels, a pattern that can persist well beyond the early postpartum months [8].

This challenge is amplified because women are having children later in life, often in their 30s or 40s. When women had children in their 20s, there was a window to recover from poor sleep and return to feeling rested, but now, the post-early childhood sleep struggles overlap with the natural age-related decline in sleep quality [9]. This is further exacerbated by perimenopause and menopause, which often start in the 40s, now just a few years postpartum, robbing todays mother of the historically available decade of recovery time.

Fragmented sleep and ongoing stress mean your brain and body struggle to achieve the restorative processes necessary for optimal health. Slow-wave sleep, the foundation of health, is key for recovery, but these disruptions make it harder to access. Research shows that enhancing slow-wave activity can help, reducing early-night cortisol and, improving immune function, which supports deeper, more restorative sleep [10]. This approach can enhance recovery even for those with limited sleep opportunities or fragmented sleep, like new mothers, by improving the restorative function of the sleep they do get [11].

References:

[8] Härdelin, G., et al. (2021). Do Mothers Have Worse Sleep Than Fathers? Sleep Imbalance, Parental Stress, and Relationship Satisfaction in Working Parents. Nature and Science of Sleep. DOI: 10.2147/NSS.S312149.
[9] Ohayon, M. M., et al. (2004). Meta-Analysis of Quantitative Sleep Parameters From Childhood to Old Age in Healthy Individuals: Developing Normative Sleep Values Across the Human Lifespan. Sleep. DOI: 10.1093/sleep/27.7.1255.
[10] Besedovsky, L, et al. (2017).Auditory closed-loop stimulation of EEG slow oscillations strengthens sleep and signs of its immune-supportive function. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02170-3.
[11]Diep C., et al. (2021). Acoustic enhancement of slow wave sleep on consecutive nights improves alertness and attention in chronically short sleepers Sleep. DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsab123.

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