Institute For The Future

The Future of Sleep

How well do you sleep? If you're like 1 in 5 Americans, you don't get enough hours of shut-eye every night. But new findings and hints of a sleep revolution are underway, that give us a peek at what sleep might look like in the future.

Sleep is a fundamental component of our health. If we don't sleep enough, we get sick and more accident-prone. So why do we give so much more attention to our diet, exercise, work, and parenting than to this basic need? 

Interesting signals are starting to pop up around sleep, which might mean we're starting to give it more respect. One of the winning ideas of IFTF's recent BodyShock the Future competition was ZedAlert, a sleep-tracking iPhone app that wakes you up and suggests that you nap/sleep at optimal times. 

Also, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have discovered a new mechanism that regulates our circadian rhythms - the internal clock that controls our bodies' daily physiological cycle. The new target they found could lead to new treatments for insomnia, jet lag, shift work, and sleep disturbances.

And then there's the Zeo. People are tracking their sleep by wearing a headband to measure their brainwaves. Zeo co-founder Ben Rubin spoke at IFTF's Health Horizons conference in June, but a new development has happened since then. A Polyphasic Sleep Experiment has started, with a dozen people gathering together to transition from sleeping 8 hours a night to sleeping in 3 discrete chunks during a 24 hour stretch. They will be monitoring their thoughts and sleep data as they experiment with changing their sleep.

At my house, we occasionally give our daughters melatonin to help them keep to a regular sleep cycle, otherwise they naturally keep shifting later and later. I'm looking forward to the day when sleep tracking is easier and more automated and we have personalized cocktails of circadian modulators to help us individually optimize our sleep/wake cycles.

Here's hoping you have a good sleep tonight!

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