Five Sleep Trends We're Not Doing
We get asked about these often enough that it's worth writing down. None of it is a judgement of anyone doing them — just where we've landed.
01 Mouth taping
The one we feel most strongly about. Taping your mouth to force nasal breathing has spread enormously online, and the risk is specific: many people who breathe through their mouth at night do so because the airway is partly obstructed, and undiagnosed sleep apnoea is common.
Restricting an airway you haven't had assessed isn't optimisation. If you snore heavily, gasp, or wake unrefreshed after a full night — that's a doctor, not tape.
02 Melatonin as a nightly sleeping pill
Melatonin is a timing signal, not a sedative. It has genuine uses — jet lag, certain circadian disorders — usually at far smaller doses than the ones sold over the counter, and taken at a specific time rather than at bedtime.
Taken nightly as a general sleep aid, it's mostly being used for something it doesn't do. It's also a regulated medicine in a number of countries, which tells you something.
03 Sleep scores as a daily verdict
We like the devices for timing and consistency. We don't like the number that greets you before you've decided how you feel, particularly since sleep staging is the thing wrist sensors estimate least reliably.
04 Polyphasic sleep
The schedules that promise four hours a night split into naps. There's no meaningful evidence they work for the general population, considerable evidence that chronic short sleep is harmful, and a long history of people abandoning them after a fortnight.
05 The twelve-step evening protocol
Every additional step is another thing to fail at, and sleep is one of the few activities that gets worse the harder you try.
Four things do most of the work: dark, quiet, cool, consistent. We'd rather someone did those four reliably than twelve occasionally.
What we'd say generally
Be most suspicious of anything sold as a shortcut, and of anything that requires you to buy something before you've turned off your ceiling light.
That advice costs us money, which we hope is the reason to believe it.
