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A decade ago, saying you got eight hours of sleep last night was roughly equivalent to saying you flossed. Minor bragging rights, nothing more. Now, sleep tracker data gets shared like gym PRs, Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep has shifted millions of copies, and Instagram is flooded with mouth-taping tutorials. Something has shifted, and it’s worth understanding what.
The Matthew Walker effect
If you want to identify the cultural hinge point, it’s probably 2017. That’s when Walker published Why We Sleep, went on every podcast that would have him, and turned sleep from a passive biological requirement into a performance variable. The book has been criticised, sometimes rigorously, for overstating several claims. But the cultural work it did was real. For the first time, a generation raised to treat sleep as something to minimise started treating it as something to optimise.
That’s a meaningful reframe. You don’t optimise things you ignore. You measure them, talk about them, and eventually spend money on them.
The wearables made it legible
The second shift was technological. Once the Oura Ring, the WHOOP strap, and the Apple Watch started producing granular sleep data, something previously invisible became a daily readout. People who’d never thought about sleep architecture now knew their deep-sleep duration, their REM percentage, and their heart rate variability overnight.
Whether these consumer devices measure sleep stages accurately is a separate argument, and the answer is “somewhat”. What matters culturally is that they produced a number. Numbers get compared. Numbers get posted. Numbers create the sense that you might be falling behind on something you previously didn’t know existed. An entire infrastructure of personal sleep metrics emerged roughly overnight, and with it the conviction that you should be doing something about your scores.
The pandemic reset something
Lockdown forced millions of people into their own bedrooms for months at a time. Commutes vanished. Social calendars emptied. People discovered, sometimes uncomfortably, that their sleep was either worse than they thought or better than they’d ever allowed it to be. Reports of disturbed sleep, vivid dreams, and insomnia spiked in 2020 and 2021; so did interest in fixing them.
When the world reopened, a lot of people didn’t go back. Hybrid work stuck around, which preserved the ability to design one’s own sleep schedule. The relationship between work and rest had been renegotiated, and sleep ended up with more cultural real estate than it had before.
Why has sleep become a trend?
The honest answer involves a few cynical elements and a few genuine ones. The cynical: wellness marketing found a new frontier after it saturated nutrition and exercise. Supplements, weighted blankets, silk pillowcases, blue-light glasses, mouth tape, magnesium glycinate, large sleeping solutions for modern homes, red-light panels, and cooling gadgets all now occupy shelves that barely existed a decade ago. Sleep became a product category, and product categories generate noise.
The genuine: accumulating research really does suggest that chronic sleep deprivation carries serious health costs, including elevated cardiovascular risk, insulin resistance, and compromised immune function. Public awareness of those findings has travelled slowly through culture, and it’s arrived now.
The burnout backdrop
Hustle culture peaked sometime around 2018 and has been in retreat since. The “rise and grind” aesthetic started to feel embarrassing as the people modelling it began publicly flaming out. Younger workers, having watched millennials burn through their thirties on four hours of sleep and green juice, started opting for something different. Recovery, rest, and sufficiency got repositioned as the actual flex.
This matters because sleep had a PR problem. For decades it was associated with laziness, weakness, or failure to hustle. Reframing rest as a performance behaviour, rather than its opposite, made it culturally acceptable to talk about. The same people who’d have felt silly saying “I got nine hours last night” in 2015 now say it confidently in 2025.
Why has sleep tracking become so popular?
Because people want proof. Subjective sleep quality is notoriously unreliable as a self-report. Most of us think we slept badly when we tossed a bit and slept well when we didn’t remember anything. Wearables produce an external metric that cuts through that unreliability, and the feedback loop of trying an intervention, watching the numbers, and adjusting is genuinely useful even when the absolute numbers are imprecise.
There’s also the social dimension. Group chats now feature screenshots of sleep scores. Competitive friendships include light trash-talk about each other’s REM percentages. This isn’t necessarily healthy, but it has driven adoption in a way that no amount of public health messaging managed.
The menopause conversation helped too
Sleep disruption during perimenopause and menopause has, finally, become a visible topic in mainstream media rather than something women were expected to absorb quietly. The conversation around hormonal sleep disruption, night sweats, and fragmented cycles has broadened the cultural attention on sleep into demographic territory that was previously underserved. Products, podcasts, and support communities built around midlife sleep have proliferated, and that attention spills outward.
Where this lands
Some of the current obsession is useful. Treating sleep as a domain worth attention, rather than something to sacrifice for everything else, is a net gain. The research is clear enough that prioritising sleep improves cognitive function, emotional regulation, physical health, and basically every other variable the wellness industry sells separately.
Some of it is silly. The quest for perfect sleep can tip into orthosomnia, a term coined to describe the anxiety produced by obsessive tracking of sleep metrics. People who worry about their sleep scores tend to sleep worse, not better. The irony of spending months optimising sleep and then lying awake fretting about how well you’re sleeping is, unfortunately, real.
The question to ask yourself is whether the attention is producing better rest or more anxiety about rest. If it’s the first, keep going. If it’s the second, the healthiest possible intervention may be to stop tracking and simply go to bed at a reasonable hour.
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