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We’re digging into what makes sleep truly restorative, because the tools most people rely on don’t always get it right. We’ve already questioned the 8-hour obsession and shown why quality beats quantity. Now, let’s take a closer look at sleep trackers. They spit out scores and stages, but how often do those numbers line up with how you actually feel?

In our last post at Affectable Sleep, we challenged the idea that 8 hours of sleep is the universal key to better health, sparking questions about what truly makes sleep restorative. This follow-up dives into some of the most common sleep struggles we hear about and aims to clear up confusion around the 8-hour rule, and showing why quality, not just quantity, drives sleep’s power to heal and refresh us.

Sleep trackers are everywhere. You see them on wrists and fingers, in phones, beside beds, all preaching 7-9 hours as the golden rule. I lived that obsession. I tracked my days and my nights, puzzled as to why 5-6 hours could leave me clear-headed some days, while on other days after a full 8 hours, I was running on empty. You’ve probably felt it too. You wake up worn out when the tracker says you slept well, or sharp when it claims you didn’t sleep enough. How do you account for this inconsistency? When my tracker showed a strong night but I didn’t feel it, I assumed the tech made a mistake. When I woke fresh but it scored me low, I thought I must have it wrong! We’ve all been there. We doubt the tech when it doesn’t fit, or let it tell us how we should feel.

At Affectable Sleep we aim to be as open as possible about our capabilities and how we plan to improve the lives of millions through improving the neurological function of the brain during sleep. Improved sleep can mean so many things to different people, but in our initial work, we’re focusing on improving the efficiency of deep sleep.Peer reviewed published research into the stimulation we work with to improve sleep is linked on our website. However, even some of our team find the research to be quite a dense read. We often talk about the health benefits and results of sound stimulation for improving sleep, but I wanted to take time to explain WHY it works. What is happening inside your brain and how do we measure the stimulation and the results.

Last week I attended a fantastic talk at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, a leading Australian research centre - if you’re not aware, Australia punches above it’s weight in medical research. The talk focused on genomics and the future of personalized healthcare. In closing comments discussing the challenges facing GPs in Australia and other parts of the world, James Tynan, a VC at Square Peg, mentioned there had yet to be a company which experienced huge success in preventative care. As it was the end of the talk, I didn’t feel it was the right time to rebut his statement, though in hindsight, I should have.

Industrial designer Raymond Loewy came up with the concept of MAYA – most advanced yet acceptable. MAYA says you can’t jump too far ahead on a time scale or you scare off customers. People need a context to understand what the thing is. They want want to be surprised by the new, but they need familiarity. Derek Thompson does a great job of explaining this concept in his TedTalk

Have you ever thought about why sleep seems so random? For many of us, when we go to sleep, we "hope" to get a good night sleep. It's a process that seems completely out of our control, which of course it is.Sleep is what's called an "Autonomic Function", and is just one of the many functions of our body that happen automatically and involuntarily. But as far as I can tell, it is the only autonomic function that for a significant portion of the population causes so many problems that we feel it just doesn't work for us.

I’m the last person you’d expect to compete in the World Sleep Championships. A life-long insomniac with Central Sleep Apnea, I’ve spent the last 10 months diving into the latest in neuroscience research with the goal of not only helping insomnia sufferers, but improving Sleep Performance for the greater population. The competition used the data from Oura rings which classifies sleep as REM, light or deep, and factors in the number of hours you slept, how quickly you fell asleep, and how much time you spent in each sleep state. 

After years of grappling with sleep issues, I began exploring ways to understand and improve how I felt after a night of rest. Many people rely on sound—podcasts, white noise, or music—to calm their minds, but these approaches only address part of the problem. Modern neurology reveals that sound can enhance the brain's sleep processes, making each phase more effective. This journey of discovery highlights the need to move beyond sleep efficiency and focus on how sleep can truly restore and prepare us for the day ahead.