Sleepmaxxing, and Where It Goes Wrong

Sleepmaxxing is what happens when the optimisation instinct arrives in the bedroom: stacked routines, supplement combinations, cold rooms, tracked scores, and an arms race of increasingly specific interventions.

We sell sleep products, so our incentive is to encourage all of this. Here's where we'd actually draw the lines.

The sensible core

Strip away the theatre and most sleepmaxxing rests on four things that are genuinely well supported: darkness, quiet, a cool room, and consistent timing.

If someone does nothing else, those four are most of the available benefit. They're also free, which is presumably why they don't sustain a content genre on their own.

The harmless additions

Magnesium, scent, herbal teas, weighted blankets, breathing patterns. Evidence ranges from modest to thin. None of it will hurt you, some of it works as a ritual cue, and if it helps you keep a routine then it's doing something even where the pharmacology doesn't.

We're comfortable with that as long as nobody claims more than it deserves.

Where we'd stop: mouth taping

This one has spread very widely and we think it deserves a genuine warning rather than a shrug.

Taping the mouth shut to force nasal breathing has become a staple of the genre. The problem is that a substantial number of people who snore or breathe through their mouth at night are doing so because their airway is partially obstructed — and a meaningful proportion of them have undiagnosed sleep apnoea.

Restricting an airway you haven't had assessed is not an optimisation. If you snore heavily, gasp in the night, or wake unrefreshed after a full night, the appropriate next step is a doctor, not adhesive.

Optimisation assumes the underlying system is healthy. If it isn't, optimisation is the wrong tool and occasionally a dangerous one.

The other failure mode

Anxiety. Sleep is one of the few things that reliably gets worse when you try harder at it, and a stacked twelve-step protocol creates something to fail at.

There's now a name for the version of this driven by tracking — orthosomnia — and we've written about it here. Getting into bed carrying the intention to sleep well is the least useful mental state available.

What we'd keep

Dark, quiet, cool, consistent. Then one or two things you enjoy, because enjoying them is most of how they work.

Everything past that is hobby, and hobbies are fine — as long as you know that's what you're doing.