I’m in bed, blinking at my phone in the dark. The Professor and his dog, Pavlov, are taking me through my first session of Sleepio, an app-based sleeping aid that was recommended by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for use in the country’s National Health Service (NHS) in 2022. The animated TED-style lecture flickers on my screen. ‘Long-term sleep problems occur when we repeatedly respond to poor sleep with unhelpful thoughts and behaviours,’ says The Professor. ‘I know, I know,’ he chuckles. ‘It can feel like a lot. You just focus on filling in your diary and we’ll handle the calculations.’

In its trials, NICE found that Sleepio reduced the number of GP appointments and could replace dependence-forming prescription drugs, thereby costing the NHS less. Sleep-related complaints have been on the rise for decades – in 2014, a series of studies from UK and US universities found that people sleep approximately two hours less per night than they did a generation ago – and app-based treatment marks a significant departure from previous medicalised approaches to insomnia.

Sleepio is one among a plethora of app-based sleeping aids that have appeared in the past decade and a half. Wearables such as the Fitbit bracelet, Oura ring and Apple Watch have, as part of their wider offering, provided sleep tracking since the early 2010s by measuring users’ heart rates and motions, and presenting them with algorithmically estimated breakdowns of their sleep phases. Their accuracy in identifying these – deep sleep, light sleep and that dream-filled phase close to wakefulness, Rapid Eye Movement sleep (REM) – is not far off that of the scalp electrodes employed in scientific sleep research. The more recent crop of app-based trackers, however, operate on your phone – they’ve been termed ‘nearables’ – and do not require users to invest in an expensive gadget, though many of them may be paired with one. In fact, they are mostly free to use if you accept their terms and conditions, but may include in-app purchases. Their tracking mechanisms are different, as are their business models: they deal primarily in data, not hardware.

This does not mean that they haven’t been designed. Sleepio, which is owned by the UK and US digital therapeutics company Big Health, has a distinctive interface geared towards reassuring the user. Rendered in the insipidly whimsical style that has been dubbed ‘Corporate Memphis’, The Professor and Pavlov deliver the sessions – six in total – from a blue-hued dreamscape of clouds and mountains that bouncily rearrange themselves into imagery illustrating the various points made. As part of each session, the app asks me multiple-choice questions about my sleeping patterns and how they make me feel – do I want to quit my job, for example? ‘Ah, yes!’ responds The Professor invariably when I select an option, as if he – as if it – knows exactly where I’m coming from. It speaks in a mild Scottish accent and is depicted as male, white, bespectacled. Pavlov skips about, occasionally punctuating The Professor’s monologues with a bark. I think it’s all meant to feel reassuring.

The six Sleepio sessions are staggered over six weeks, and only become available to users when a full seven days have passed and certain tasks have been performed, such as filling in the Sleep Diary. The sessions themselves can only proceed once I have responded to multiple-choice questions – if I don’t tell the app how much caffeine I consume in an average week, or how many times I typically get up to pee at night, I will get stuck, and have to start again. This choice of architecture makes it impossible to race ahead, focusing users’ attention on the tasks at hand and the ultimate goal of achieving 90 percent sleep efficiency – that is, time spent sleeping in relation to time spent in bed, the principal measure of sleep quality used by Sleepio. But of course, the app also serves to gather a set of intimate data about my body, thoughts and consumer habits, which is used, Sleepio says, to tailor the automated sessions to my needs.

Almost all sleep trackers will tell you that the services they offer are backed ‘by science’. In Sleepio’s case, the scientific framework used is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Originally developed in the 1960s to treat depression, CBT is a results-oriented talking approach that helps patients develop specific coping strategies for those ‘unhelpful thoughts and behaviours’. It has become the therapeutic model of choice for many public health services around the world, including the NHS, owing to its efficacy in ‘fixing’ depression and anxiety, and getting people back into work quickly. Unlike other talking therapies, CBT does not encourage patients to reflect on the underlying causes of their malaise, but focuses on making the symptoms manageable. It has, for this reason, been criticised for its sticking-plaster approach to mental health. As the writer and psychotherapist Farhad Dalal points out in his 2018 book, CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami, CBT first received state funding under New Labour in the 1990s because of claims that it could help boost productivity and make public savings to the tune of £7 billion. Economy, efficiency, productivity: CBT fits neatly into this neoliberal framework. It is wholly unsurprising, then, that Sleepio’s business model is geared not towards individuals, but employers. ‘With our digital therapeutics, employers and health plans can lower health care costs,’ Big Health’s website boasts.

Sleepio’s key saving is, of course, getting rid of the therapist altogether. I do not get to speak to a human being who has undergone costly training, but must listen to The Professor, who appears to be an avatar of Colin Espie, a Scottish psychologist and sleep specialist who runs the Sleep and Circadian Neurosciences Institute at Oxford University and is also a co-founder of Big Health. Pavlov is presumably named after Ivan Pavlov, the Russian neurologist whose experiments – on dogs, no less – led to the discovery that behavioural patterns can be changed through association and repetition; an observation that came to underpin the development of modern-day CBT.

The CBT-led approach means that Sleepio is just as concerned, if not more, with how I feel about my sleep as it is about accurate data. That’s not the case with most other sleep-focused nearables. Sweden-based Sleep Cycle, an app that is free to download but includes paid-for features, records the noises I make at night and uses an analysis of these to determine which sleep phase I’m in. Every night, I set an alarm through the Sleep Cycle app by indicating a half-hour window in which it’s OK for the app to wake me up. Sleep Cycle’s algorithm then proceeds to rouse me when it determines that I’m in a light sleep phase – though it’s unclear what happens if I’m in deep sleep or REM during the entirety of my half-hour interval (an average sleep cycle lasts for 90–110 minutes). It will never not wake me up. Ideally, Sleep Cycle’s alarm should feel, the app explains, ‘like waking up naturally rested without an alarm clock’. The alarm feature, and a Journal tab that illustrates each night’s sleep phases in a graph, are the main offerings of the free app.

But a tech company must make its pennies somehow, and Sleep Cycle’s users are encouraged to subscribe to a premium service with the help of various nudges. In addition to its main graph, for example, the Journal tab shows waveform representations of snippets of audio recorded during the night. Try to play them, and a pop-up will ask you to sign up for premium membership for only US $29.99 a year. It’s worth dwelling on the sheer dystopian weirdness of this for a moment: I have consented, for free, to have myself recorded while I’m unconscious and, now, that recording is being sold back to me. Not only that: Sleep Cycle’s algorithm needs to learn my unique sounds. The waveforms on the Journal page are accompanied by suggested labels: ‘Coughing, Movement, Inhale, Exhale?’ one recording suggests. ‘Talking?’ for another. Once I sign up for the paid service, I am free to listen to myself sleeping, talking, moving and inhaling, but I’m also encouraged to add labels to each recorded snippet – in other words, I’m asked to help Sleep Cycle refine its algorithm. I am not paid to perform these tasks, nor am I even doing them for free. I am paying Sleep Cycle to work for Sleep Cycle.

And to what end? It is unclear what I am meant to glean from the recorded information, and listening to myself sleep hardly makes me sleep better – on the contrary, it makes me more conscious of the noises in my bedroom and on my street, and more worried about what they might be. A premium Sleep Cycle subscription also unlocks tips on sleep hygiene, relaxing music and ASMR audio, but similar content is readily available on YouTube, or with even cursory research into what makes a good sleeping environment. It is the recordings, and the deep-seated anxieties that they exploit, that reel paying users in. ‘Sleep evokes unique feelings of vulnerability that cut across cultures (and even across species),’ historian Sasha Handley noted in her 2016 study Sleep in Early Modern England. ‘These feelings are heavily shaped by the dulled consciousness imposed by this state of repose.’ It is a strange type of sleeping aid that capitalises on this very vulnerability.

The year 2023 marks a decade since the art historian Jonathan Crary published his influential book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. The slim volume showed how sleep itself is beleaguered and relentlessly encroached upon because it constitutes ‘one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism’. It cannot ‘be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability,’ Crary argued. ‘The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.’ Is this still true, some ten years on? The sleep tracking apps and gadgets that have appeared on the market since 24/7 came out seem to herald the ‘ends of sleep’ more convincingly and completely than any example discussed in the book. They have certainly found various novel ways of extracting value from sleep: even as I rest, I am generating monetisable data; even as I consume, I produce. ‘Remember,’ the Situationists polemicised in the 1950s, quoting Belgian surrealist Louis Scutenaire, ‘you are sleeping for the boss!’

All sleep trackers will tell you that your data is in good hands; that it’s safely stored and won’t be sold off to third-party operators unless you explicitly consent. True, this is critical in an age of passive, often voluntary participation in the mining of biometric information. But data often leaks. In 2021, a database belonging to third-party operator GetHealth – which pulls information from the likes of Fitbit, Apple Watch, Microsoft and Google – was found online without password protection. Information from approximately 60 million records was exposed to anyone who knew where to look for it. And sometimes, it is not accidental. In 2019, an investigative report in The Wall Street Journal found that menstrual cycle tracker Flo, along with ten other popular tracking apps, shared intimate information – including when users were on their periods or trying to get pregnant – with Facebook, which in turn used the information to personalise its ads. There was no in-app option to stop the tracker from doing this.

Self-tracking – an impulse that most app-based sleep aids rely on – does have its uses. As Deborah Lupton notes in her 2016 book The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking, diaries and recording for medical, reproductive and self-improvement purposes have existed since ancient times, and they remain important diagnostic tools. If I want to sleep better, it may be worth noting my habits and sleep quality in order to spot patterns. A nearable that leans into the quantifying impulse is SleepScore, an app run out of premises in San Diego. It uses nature’s own sonar system echolocation – yes, many new smartphones can do this – to track my movements as I sleep, giving me an overall sleep efficiency score as well as a range of other metrics: MindScore (a measure of REM sleep), BodyScore (deep sleep) and Breathing Rate. But how useful are these ‘scores’? If I’ve had a bad night’s sleep and my MindScore is crap, seeing it quantified simply confirms what I already know. The only difference is that I’ve shared this information with a company in San Diego.

Lupton warned against an excessive reliance on digital technologies for self-tracking, given the privacy risks of using biometric tracking apps. However, excessive self-tracking in itself can also cause problems. A study conducted in 2017 at Northwestern University found that some users of sleep-tracking devices became overly ‘preoccupied or concerned with improving or perfecting their wearable sleep data’ in ‘a perfectionistic quest for the ideal sleep in order to optimise daytime function’. The researchers termed this ‘orthosomnia’. A number of design strategies that encourage this behaviour are employed by the apps that I have tested. Take the daily breakdowns, for example – these are the default, as opposed to, say, weekly ones, which some sleep scientists have suggested are more helpful in providing an overall picture of sleep health. Then there are the nudges encouraging me to subscribe, or add more personalised information to my nightly tracking, that appear within and outside the apps. Even The Professor, whose character is designed to exude patient understanding, appears in my inbox when I’ve neglected to input information: ‘It’s time to fill in your Sleep Diary! / All best, / The Prof.’

My sleep did not improve noticeably in the months I spent using sleep trackers. I did, however, spend more time on my phone, interacting with the apps; I received more automated emails; I signed up to more subscription services; and I paid to hear what it sounds like when I grind my teeth. There were helpful tips on how to stop my thoughts racing, and how to arrange my bedroom for optimal sleep. But ultimately, none of the nearables encouraged me to do what many sleep experts agree is a golden rule of sleep hygiene: simply leave your phone in another room while you sleep.