Sleep is the Foundation of Your Wellbeing

Your sleep need is personal.

Every person needs a certain amount of consistent sleep to perform optimally. However, we know you don't always need to be performing at your best. Life happens and sometimes it's important to stay up late or wake up early. You can choose to sleep less and make that tradeoff. What's important is being aware of your current sleep debt to make informed choices.

The vast majority of adults need 7-9 hours to be their best. For example, in a study, people were allowed to sleep 12 hours per night for 9 days. The average sleep duration started at 10.6 hours on the first night and leveled off at 8.4 hours on subsequent nights with a range of 7.29–9.26 hours.

How does RISE know how much sleep I need?

Sleep rebound is the difference between the amount you get when you are sleeping as much as possible and the amount you get on average. Although most people don’t sleep as much as they possibly could on weekends, many people sleep a lot more on weekends than during the week. By looking at the rebound between weekend nights and weekday nights, RISE can estimate your sleep need. Research has shown your need remains the same throughout adulthood.

What 100 years of sleep science tells us.

We believe in evidence. And we know that the bigger the claim, the more evidence required. Sleep has been studied longer than penicillin. It was first studied in our hometown at the University of Chicago in 1925. Since then, there have been about 1.24 million academic papers published talking about the effects of sleep and how sleep works. (For reference, exercise has just 646k academic papers.) Here are some of the findings:

Mental Performance

Healthy sleep improves cognitive skills; you’re more focused, insightful, and creative; you’ll learn better and have an improved memory.

• Sustained attention: sleep debt leads to slower response times and increased errors in tasks that require sustained attention, especially under time pressure and as task duration lengthens.
• Reaction time: every additional hour of sleep increases reaction time by 7%
• Insight: sleep facilitates the extraction of explicit knowledge and insightful behavior. Researchers found 2x as many subjects gained insights after 8 hours of sleep than after wakefulness.

Physical Wellbeing and Performance

Healthy sleep helps your body function better; you don’t get sick as often; skin looks healthier; metabolism increases; and less craving unhealthy snacks.

• Metabolism: just six nights of restricted sleep causes 30-40% decrease in metabolism
• Immunity: sleeping less than 7 hours a night makes you 3x more likely to catch the common cold.
• Hormone production: sleep deprivation with circadian misalignment reduced sensitivity to insulin.

Emotional Wellbeing

Not only that, but within days of healthy sleep, you’re more empathetic and positive, while anxiety and depression decrease.

• Anxiety: losing an hour of sleep for one week creates a clinical level of anxiety disorders.
• Empathy: decreasing sleep debt by 8 hours increases empathic response by 30%.

The team at Rise Science takes the very best of the last 100 years of sleep science and makes it useful. When you follow the science, you’ll live better and longer. From in-app details to every blog post, we believe you deserve the truth. If we can’t defend what we do to a room of sleep and behavior scientists, we won’t do it.

It’s time to reprioritize.

Sleep is not a luxury. Sleep deprivation has reached epidemic levels and has been getting worse, according to the CDC. Most people aren’t getting enough sleep, and they aren’t sleeping at the right times.

You’ve started using the only app that produces the real-world benefits of better sleep. We pioneered this approach with professional and collegiate teams across the NFL, MLB, NBA, MLS, and NCAAF. Today, our mission is to make the world healthier, safer, and more productive through better sleep. We care about you realizing the real-world benefits of sleep, not just tracking it.

“Sustained exhaustion is not a rite of passage. It’s a mark of stupidity.”

Jason Fried, Basecamp CEO Customer since 2017

We at Rise Science see a trend of people investing in prioritizing sleep. Some of the biggest companies in the world are improving wellness and productivity through sleep. Google and Goldman Sachs cover healthy sleep in employee training. Aetna actually pays its employees about a buck for every night they sleep seven to nine hours. You couldn't have picked a better time to improve your quality of life through better sleep.

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