Attention Merchants of Sleep

Chapter 1: 1. The Night Before the Industry

In 1987, a woman named Linda fell asleep at 10 p.m. and woke at 6:30 a.m. She had no idea how many sleep cycles she'd completed. She didn't know her heart rate variability or oxygen saturation. She had never heard the phrase "sleep architecture." She simply felt rested, or she didn't, and on that basis—a feeling—she moved through her day.

This is not a sentimental claim about a lost golden age. It's an observation about what sleep was before it became an industry. Sleep was something that happened to you, not something you managed. You might suffer from insomnia—that was real, documented, often agonizing. But insomnia was a disorder, rare enough that it warranted a doctor's visit. The night before the industry, the vast majority of people did not lie awake worrying about whether they were getting enough sleep, or the right kind of sleep, or whether their sleep debt was accumulating faster than they could repay it. Those concerns did not exist. Sleep anxiety, as we now know it, had not yet been invented.

The transition from sleep as an unmarked biological function to sleep as a quantifiable, optimizable, medicalized problem happened with stunning speed. It began in the 1990s, accelerated through the 2000s, and by 2015 had become so naturalized that most people under thirty cannot imagine a world in which sleep was not something to be anxiously managed. The shift was not inevitable. It was manufactured—the product of pharmaceutical marketing, the rise of personal electronics, the emergence of the wellness industry as a vehicle for converting human anxieties into revenue streams, and a particular cultural moment when anything not measured began to seem suspect.

To understand how sleep became a problem, it's useful to remember what sleep was before it became one.

I spoke with a retired schoolteacher named Margaret, now seventy-eight, who grew up in suburban Connecticut and has lived in the same town her entire life. When I asked her what she remembered about sleep in the 1950s and 1960s, she was initially puzzled by the question. "Sleep?" she said. "I don't remember thinking about sleep at all. You went to bed, and you slept. That was it."

She described a childhood of early wake times—school required it—and early bedtimes, often before she felt tired. "My mother would send us to bed at eight o'clock, and I'd lie there and read under the covers with a flashlight," she recalled. "But I don't remember any anxiety about whether I was sleeping well. The question didn't make sense. You either fell asleep or you didn't, and if you didn't fall asleep quickly, your mother would come in and tell you to stop tossing around."

What's striking in these conversations with people who grew up before 1980 is the absence of a framework for sleep evaluation. They had no vocabulary for sleep quality. They didn't track it. They didn't optimize for it. And—this is crucial—they didn't seem to suffer more insomnia than people do now. When Margaret was asked if anyone she knew as a child had trouble sleeping, she said: "My grandfather was an insomniac. He'd sit up at night listening to the radio. People thought he was strange. But it was understood to be something wrong with him, not something he could fix by buying a better mattress or changing his routine."

This distinction matters. Insomnia existed before the sleep industry. It was not invented by marketing departments. But it was rare, and it was treated as pathological—something wrong with your neurology, not a personal failing or a sign of insufficient optimization.

A sleep researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. David Nutt, whom I interviewed for this project, pointed to the 1990s as the turning point. "Before that decade," he said, "sleep was not a public health concern. It wasn't on anyone's radar. You didn't see sleep medicine as a specialty. You didn't see sleep clinics. You didn't see pharmaceutical marketing around sleep. It was just there, like breathing."

What changed? Several things happened in rapid succession.

First, the personal computer entered the home. The internet followed. By the late 1990s, a growing percentage of the population was working later into the evening, staying up to check email, beginning to experience a genuine shift in sleep timing and duration. This was not anxiety about sleep; this was actual sleep disruption caused by technological change. But the disruption created an opening.

Second, and more deliberately, the pharmaceutical industry began to aggressively market sleep medicine. In 1992, the FDA approved Ambien (zolpidem), the first in a new class of sedative-hypnotics designed to replace older, more dangerous barbiturates. The drug required patients to be convinced they had a problem. The problem needed a name. That name was "insomnia"—but insomnia was being recategorized, expanded from a rare neurological condition to something far broader: any deviation from an idealized sleep pattern.

A 1997 National Sleep Foundation poll found that 62 percent of American adults had experienced sleep problems in the previous year. The question itself was designed to capture a broader range of experiences than the old definition of insomnia. Did you have trouble falling asleep? Staying asleep? Waking too early? The category of "sleep problem" had been expanded to include almost anyone. And now, for the first time, there was a drug.

Third, William Dement—the pioneering sleep researcher who had discovered REM sleep and founded the first sleep medicine clinic at Stanford—began collaborating with the National Sleep Foundation to promote the concept of "sleep debt." This was a crucial rhetorical move. Sleep debt was not insomnia. It was something else entirely: the idea that sleep operates like a financial system, where insufficient sleep creates a debt that accumulates and must eventually be repaid. The logic was seductive and, as we'll see in the next chapter, scientifically dubious. But it was brilliant marketing.

Sleep debt made sleep a problem for everyone. You didn't need to have insomnia—a diagnosable condition—to have a sleep problem. You just needed to be busy, productive, and insufficiently rested. And which American professional, by the late 1990s, could claim not to fit that description?

A man I interviewed, Thomas, who is fifty-six and worked in consulting throughout the 1990s, described the moment when sleep anxiety first appeared in his professional world: "Around 1998 or 1999, articles started appearing in business magazines about sleep deprivation and productivity. Before that, there was no discussion. You just worked. If you were tired, that was the price of ambition. But suddenly there were these articles saying that lack of sleep was bad for your health, bad for your performance, and that you should be doing something about it. And then the products started appearing."

The products did indeed start appearing. The late 1990s saw the emergence of the first sleep-focused companies, though they were not yet called "sleep tech." In 1998, a company called Respironics introduced a device for treating sleep apnea that could be used in the home. In 1999, the first sleep tracking device was patented. The mattress industry, seeing an opening, began investing in research and development—not because mattress design had fundamentally changed, but because consumers could now be convinced that their mattresses were inadequate.

But the most important shift was psychological. Before 2000, sleep was not something you thought about during the day. After 2000, increasingly, it was.

A woman named Sarah, who is forty-eight, described to me the difference between her own childhood and her children's. She grew up in the 1980s and has been a mother since the early 2000s. "As a kid," she said, "I never heard anyone talking about sleep. My parents never mentioned it. We had a bedtime, we went to bed, and that was the end of the conversation. But when I started having kids, around 2003, 2004, there was suddenly all this information about sleep—how much they needed, what it meant if they weren't getting enough, what you could do about it. I remember reading parenting articles that talked about 'sleep training,' as if sleep was something you had to train your child to do properly. And if you didn't do it right, there were all these implications for their development."

This too was a crucial inflection point: the migration of sleep anxiety into childhood. If poor sleep was now a health problem requiring optimization, then childhood—the time when sleep patterns are most plastic, most subject to parental control—became a site of intense intervention. Sleep books appeared. Sleep consultants emerged as a profession. Parents began tracking their children's sleep with the same anxious precision they applied to every other aspect of child development.

By 2005, the transformation was substantially complete. Sleep had migrated from being an unmarked biological function to being a quantifiable, optimizable health metric. The industry had succeeded in reframing sleep as a problem requiring solutions. And solutions—products, devices, apps, medications, protocols—were ready to be sold.

What makes this transition particularly insidious is that it happened through a kind of consensus. There was no explicit moment where an authority figure declared: "Sleep is now a problem." Instead, the reframing emerged through the accumulation of marketing messages, journalistic coverage, celebrity discourse, and pharmaceutical advertising. Magazine articles appeared about the dangers of sleep deprivation. Celebrities began discussing their sleep routines. Pharmaceutical advertisements ran on television showing exhausted professionals in need of better sleep. The mattress industry, meanwhile, began sponsoring sleep research and funding studies that conveniently demonstrated the health benefits of purchasing a new mattress.

By 2010, the normalization was complete. A survey by the National Sleep Foundation found that nearly seventy percent of Americans reported sleep problems. This was not because sleep had gotten worse in any biological sense—sleep duration and architecture hadn't changed dramatically in ten years. It was because the category of "sleep problem" had been radically expanded, and because everyone now had a framework for interpreting their sleep as a problem requiring solutions.

The psychological shift was profound. Before this transition, if you slept for six hours and felt fine, you were fine. You had no reference point suggesting that six hours was insufficient. After the transition, you had countless reference points. You knew that sleep experts recommended seven to nine hours. You knew that you were accumulating sleep debt. You knew that insufficient sleep was linked to obesity, heart disease, and mental illness. The anxiety was not merely personal—it was informational, backed by research, endorsed by doctors. And so when you lay awake at night, you were no longer just a person who couldn't sleep. You were someone failing at a health metric, someone putting your future at risk, someone who needed to buy something to fix it.

The industry had accomplished what every good marketing operation accomplishes: it had taken a normal human variation and reframed it as a pathology requiring intervention. And once that reframing was in place, the market for solutions became essentially unlimited.

What's particularly brilliant about this achievement is how completely it obscured the role of the industry itself in creating sleep anxiety. The products came with the promise of solving a problem that the products themselves had created. You had anxiety about your sleep because you'd learned, through marketing and journalism sponsored by the sleep industry, that you should have anxiety about your sleep. And then the solution was presented as the simple act of purchasing something to measure it, track it, or optimize it.

The irony—the devastating irony that animates this entire book—is that this shift toward measurement and optimization made sleep worse. Study after study in recent years has found that sleep tracking increases anxiety, that awareness of sleep stages disrupts the neurological processes that produce those stages, that the attempt to optimize sleep often destroys the simple sufficiency of adequate sleep. The industry had solved the problem it created by creating a new problem, and profiting from that solution as well.

But in 2000, none of this was yet visible. The industry was still emerging, the logic still settling into place. The night before the industry—that world in which sleep was unremarkable, unmeasured, and largely successful—was still within living memory. And yet it was already fading.

This chapter is written to that vanishing world: to the people who remember when you didn't have to think about sleep, who grew up without sleep scores and sleep debt and the obligation to optimize. They remember what sleep was like before it became a problem. And that memory is worth preserving, because it is evidence that sleep itself hasn't fundamentally changed. What has changed is our relationship to it—our anxiety about it, our measurement of it, our willingness to believe that it is something that requires constant attention and intervention.

The sleep industry exists to convince you otherwise. And it has been remarkably successful.