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IT REALLY IS the weirdest thing.
I’ll be lying there sleeping, with my eye mask on and my mouth taped shut, when I start to hear them. They’re faint tones, subtle beeps, maybe closer to taps. The exact texture of the sounds escapes me, but I hear them and fully understand what they mean. Remember, though: I am not awake. In fact, I might even be dreaming; the sounds work their way into my dreams from time to time. It’s like the scenes in Inception when Leo and co. hear Edith Piaf echoing in the rafters, reminding them that she regrets nothing and also that they’re dreaming. It’s just like that, except I’m not Leo and the sounds aren’t a song and, if they were, they’d be closer to Brian Eno than Edith Piaf.
Let me back up. I can’t stay asleep. I can fall asleep no problem—anytime, anywhere, not to brag—but staying asleep has never been my thing. For most of my 30s and all of my 40s, I’ve been awake most nights between 2 and 4 a.m., lying awake in my bed until I drift back into a shallow sleep before rising for good, naturally and without fail, around 5:30. I have not woken up to a morning alarm since the second Bush administration.
Part of this is just life. Sleep patterns change as we get older, and we tend to get less of the deep, body-and-soul-restoring stuff that we mean by a “good night’s sleep.” Instead, our sleep tends to get lighter and more fragmented, and we miss out on some of the overnight maintenance that occurs during shut-eye: memory processing, metabolism regulation, cellular cleanup—the whole janitorial shift. This is known technically as “sleeping like shit,” which is a hallmark of middle-aged life.
I wish I could say I toss and turn with worry over climate change or the state of our fragile democracy when I’m awake, but honestly, I’m just staring at the ceiling. I’ve tried pretty much everything to sleep through the night, from prescription drugs and supplements to meditation, gentle movement, and (yes) eye masks and mouth tape. But I haven’t found anything that reliably keeps me asleep without messing with some other part of sleep. The most successful remedy has been the nerdiest: For a few years, I would pick up my iPad—in Night Shift and dark mode—and read the Wikipedia bio of every English king since Henry II, each night learning about a new monarch until I fell back to sleep. When I reached Elizabeth II, I moved on to the French kings and then the American presidents, each entry just boring enough to knock me out. I retained none of this information, because I wasn’t trying to. The boredom was the point.
Earlier this year, I read about the NextSense Smartbuds, which I found intriguing because they are not another dumb sleep tracker—a device that tells you, with clinical precision and what I can only read as sarcasm, that you slept like crap. The Smartbuds have built-in EEG sensors—a consumer version of the brain-wave-reading tech used in sleep labs—that track your sleep stages and play soft, precisely timed sound pulses meant to nudge your brain toward deeper sleep. In theory, the device is not just measuring or evaluating sleep. It is trying to intervene.
The underlying idea is not total hocus-pocus. There’s real research behind what’s called closed-loop auditory stimulation, and studies have found that precisely timed sounds can enhance slow brain waves, the kind associated with deep sleep. That does not mean a pair of consumer earbuds is the same thing as a controlled sleep-lab treatment any more than my massage gun is the same thing as physical therapy. But it also means the premise of the Smartbuds is not simply “What if AirPods, but witchier?”
Every night, I insert the earbuds, with the sensors—which look like rubber hooks—nestled into the curves of my ears, and when I activate the app and lay my phone down on the nightstand, white noise begins to play until I fall asleep. (The white noise turns off at some point, though I’m not sure when because, again, I am asleep.) Some nights I sleep through the night and don’t remember hearing anything at all. Other nights I’ll wake up in the morning with a faint recollection of the tones or beeps or taps. Either way: I don’t fully wake up anymore.
So, yeah: It works! Or it works for me. Which is a boring but important qualification, because sleep is one of those areas where every potential solution is both miraculous and useless, depending entirely on the person trying it. I was surprised by how much I didn’t mind the earbuds. I can’t wear most earbuds for longer than an hour or two before they start to hurt, but these fit comfortably enough to forget about, which is pretty much the highest compliment one can give to technology designed to be worn while unconscious. They are small, soft, and unobtrusive, and they stay put—even for a side sleeper like me.
Do I feel better rested? Hard to say. Most of my daily fatigue seems to come less from lack of sleep than from acute and persistent stress, a difference my body has chosen to make extremely blurry. Also, I am a middle-aged man with a job, children, a mortgage, a phone, and a brain. There are limits to what even the finest sleep technology can accomplish when the raw material is this compromised.
But what I do know is this: I am not suffering from the two extra hours of sleep. And if a pair of brain-reading bedtime earbuds can keep me from spending my 40s becoming an amateur historian of European monarchy at 3 a.m., I am willing to let the tiny robots sing me back to sleep.
Richard Dorment is the editorial director of Men’s Health and Women’s Health.
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