Grounded in current sleep science, with the evidence for each answer shown
How well are you set up
to sleep?
Twenty-six questions about what actually moves the needle. You get a score built only on the habits you can change, the mechanism behind every recommendation, and a plan of the few worth doing first.
- 26questions, one at a time
- 5pillars of sleep health
- ~4minutes, nothing leaves your device
Installed and ready offline.
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The assessment
Answer honestly rather than aspirationally. Every question opens up to show you the science underneath it.
Why this works
Your sleep score
A weighted read of the twenty-three habits you can actually decide to change, weighted towards the ones with the strongest evidence behind them. The three things you cannot simply decide are reported separately below.
What your sleep actually looks like
These three are deliberately left out of the score. How long you sleep, how quickly you drop off and whether you breathe well at night are outcomes and, in the last case, a medical matter. You cannot decide to fall asleep faster, so being marked down for it would tell you nothing you can act on.
Something above is worth a conversation with your GP rather than an adjustment to your routine.
Where your score comes from
Five pillars, each scored on the questions that belong to it.
View as a table
| Pillar | Score | What it covers |
|---|
Your plan
Ordered by how much each change would move your score. Writing down what you will actually do, with a time and a place, makes you far more likely to do it.
Nothing is dragging your score down. Keep doing exactly what you are doing.
Your notes are saved in this browser only.
Already working for you
Worth knowing what to protect.
The toolkit
Four ways to get at the science directly, rather than reading about it.
It is the middle of the night and you are awake
The best-evidenced things to do here are not techniques for falling asleep. Two of them are components of the treatment that actually works for insomnia, and one of them will sound like the opposite of what you want.
How long have you been lying there?
There is deliberately no timer here. Watching the clock is one of the reliable ways to keep yourself awake, which is why the assessment asks whether you can see one from your pillow. Estimate, badly, and move on.
Dr Andrew Weil’s 4-7-8 breath
Counting sheep does not work; Oxford tested it. This does have a mechanism behind it. Slow exhalation stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, the calming counterpart to fight or flight, which is exactly the gear you need to be in before sleep.
Use it to wind down, not to make yourself sleep. As an insomnia treatment, relaxation training performs worse than the behavioural methods in the tab next door, and a technique you are gripping onto in order to force sleep becomes sleep effort, which is part of what keeps people awake. If you are lying there breathing furiously and watching for results, get up instead.
- Rest the tip of your tongue against the ridge behind your upper teeth, and keep it there throughout.
- Exhale completely through your mouth, with a whooshing sound.
- Close your mouth and inhale through your nose for a count of four.
- Hold your breath for seven.
- Exhale through your mouth for eight, whooshing, lips pursed if it feels odd.
Four cycles, about 76 seconds.
What is still in your system at bedtime
Caffeine has a half-life of roughly five to six hours, so this models what is left blocking your adenosine receptors when your head hits the pillow. Move the controls and watch the curve.
Half-life used: 5.5 hours. A mug of filter coffee is treated as 95mg, and remember decaf still carries fifteen to thirty percent of that.
True or false?
Thirteen claims about sleep. Commit to an answer, then see what the research says.
What a night actually looks like
Deep non-REM sleep dominates the first half of the night and REM the second, which is why cutting the last two hours costs you a disproportionate share of your dreaming sleep. Drag the wake-time handle and watch what you lose.
| Stage | At this length | At eight hours |
|---|
Schematic, not a recording of your night. The shape, deep sleep front-loaded and REM back-loaded, is the point.
Why any of this matters
Tap any card to turn it over.
The best-evidenced single change is going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, weekends included. Measured on the wrist rather than self-reported, how regular your sleep is predicts how long you live better than how long you sleep.