What Sleeping Will (Probably) Look Like In The Future
Sleep is one of the big human essentials, up there with food, water, and air. It's also an essential that 40% of adult Americans don't get enough of.
If there's not a physiological limiter on our sleep, we'll routinely stay up late, wake up early, or both because we treasure our conscious, waking hours.
Of course, the rigid scientific and cultural norms we've developed around sleep are, in human history, recent developments. When, how, and where people sleep hasn't been a constant, and it's likely that in our near future, sleep will start to look pretty different. Already, steps are being taken to make getting a good night's rest a more futuristic affair. What could happen to improve and reinvent our snoozing in the near — and far-flung — future?
Printing A Personal Pillow
3D printing is developing and reinventing entire industries faster than you can read "Goodnight Moon." The quick iteration time and potential for bespoke, customized products grants 3D printing a substantial foothold in any setting — so long as the materials are right. One of 3D printing's foremost pioneering researchers, Kai Parthy, developed a printable material that has the properties of memory foam. When the material is printed in its initial shape, it's hard and rigid like plastic. After soaking in water or being exposed to humid air for enough time, the material begins to exhibit viscoelasticity. Thanks to Parthy's research, you can now 3D print an object that will fluff back up to the shape it was printed in.
Parthy's material and future viscoelastic printing materials could find applications in many different walks of life, but imagine this: you flip open your laptop, looking to buy a new pillow. The store website requests access to your webcam — when granted, the webcam software could employ similar tech that lets your favorite photo app put an augmented reality doggie nose on your face. With the points extrapolated from the webcam feed, a 3D model of your face could be captured and uploaded to the manufacturer's servers. Then, when you order your pillow, the head model could be employed to carefully adjust the contours of your memory foam pillow to your head's real geometry. Then, at a printing bay, out pops your perfect pillow.
Anyone who has had to fluff, refluff, and triple-fluff a limp pillow might be excited to hear that we can't be far from cushioning that's just for your head and always bounces back. The thought of it might have you sleeping easier already.
Bringing Back Naptime
You've probably heard of trendy, hip offices setting aside spaces where employees can take a midday nap. Napping has had a fluctuating reputation in the health world, but a string of recent studies has set off this naptime revival. The American Psychological Association recently published a summary of some of the more up-to-date and promising research into the benefits of midday snoozing, and the takeaways shouldn't be slept on.
First and perhaps most promising, a study by Sara Mednick, PhD suggests that napping can be beneficial for your memory — participants in the study who only napped prior to a memory test performed just as well as those who had a full night's rest. That particular study focused on naps that were about an hour-long, but Mednick's also an advocate for short, 20-minute power naps. As Mednick told WebMD, a 20-minute power nap can help with motor learning, while longer naps can prove effective in tests like vocabulary recall. Naps can, of course, refresh you and aid with alertness — but according to Mednick, it's a bigger deal than that:
Is taking a catnap better than reaching for a cup of joe? Yes, Mednick says, because caffeine can decrease memory performance. So you may feel more wired, but you are also prone to making more mistakes.
So is it time to petition your office to replace the coffee machine with a Murphy bed? If the pressure's on at your office — deadlines a-plenty, tensions running high — maybe so. The APA also cites a University of Michigan study that showed naps had a marked improvement on mood and emotion relative to watching an hour of a nature documentary. If a nap can melt away a bad mood better than the voice of David Attenborough or Morgan Freeman, they've gotta be doing something right.
There are studies that suggest some downsides to napping, and while a midday rest-up might be a good supplement to sleep and aid to productivity, you shouldn't write off the powers of a solid eight hours in a comfy bed. Plus, the biggest barrier to incorporating naps in the workday has got to be the practicality of it. It's hard to imagine every office in the world instituting naptime, but who knows; with more research and advocacy, we might see workers pushing for their naptime rights.
Will Humans Always Need Sleep?
It's a question worth asking — we definitely need it now, and some of us chronically don't get enough, but that doesn't mean things can't change. A lot of research going into this area is military supported. The safety and performance benefits to being well-rested can't be underestimated. Of course, the history of trying to find a chemical workaround that eliminates the cost of sleep, i.e. the time you're out of commission actually doing the snoozing, is thorny. Improvements and new discoveries continue to be made in the field of skipping sleep altogether. Aeon.com published a compelling account of new advancements being made in the field, but as they note, "an eight-hour consolidated sleep is the ultimate cognitive enhancer."
To be in tip-top shape in any setting, being fresh off a proper night's sleep can't be beat. New medications, cranial stimulation, and gene therapy methods have a long way to go in terms of safety and accessibility before they can make a dent in the eight hours a day an adult should devote to sleep.
Smarter Beds, Smarter Everything
Thankfully, we don't just live in a time where we collectively know more about sleep than before — now we can know more about our own personal sleep patterns with the press of a button. The smart home and smartphone revolutions have extended into the way we sleep, putting metrics (that you'd previously need to be in observation at a hospital to get) directly at your fingertips.
You've probably heard of or even tried an app that tracks your sleeping characteristics — when you enter into different stages of sleep, how much you toss and turn, even whether you snore or sleep talk. Beautyrest SmartMotion™ bases have sensor technology at their core that feeds data to the accompanying Sleeptracker® app. Instead of needing to sleep with a phone by your pillow, Sleeptracker technology lets you leave the gadgets on the charging dock where they belong (let's admit it — a great night's sleep can be ruined by waking up with your phone at 1% battery).
The SmartMotion base does more than track your sleep. Want a massage? It's a button press away. Got a snoring partner? SmartMotion works like a traditional adjustable bed, letting you subtly adjust the angle of the entire bed. Adjust their sleeping position to a snore-less state and you can rest easier.
Our smarter sleep future doesn't need to stop there. Wearable "smart fabrics" continue to develop at a startling pace, opening up new fashion and function possibilities everywhere you look. Smart fabrics can be designed to regulate body temperature. Temperature is an essential aspect to comfortable sleep; too warm and you strip the blankets off, too cold and you shiver yourself out of a peaceful slumber. Beautyrest mattresses have already come a long way in tackling the temperature conundrum — special AirCool® memory foam layers help move heat away from your body to bring you closer to an optimal sleep temperature.
Imagine this, though: you have a partner who's an incorrigible blanket hog. Nightly, they pull the covers off your side of the comfy Beautyrest mattress you share. You can tell from the SmartMotion readings and your new reliance on a second cup of coffee at 11:30 am that you're not sleeping as well as you could be. And then — smart pajamas arrive on your doorstep. That night, when your partner steals the blankets, the smart materials warm up without outside electricity, but through fine-tuned, specially engineered responses to temperature that change the shape and temperature resistance of the fabric at a micro-level. The next morning, you check your Sleeptracker® app and bingo — the best night of sleep in weeks.
Dreaming Of A Restful Tomorrow
There are so many developing advancements in the science of sleep that it can be hard to wrap your head around what's possible in our future. Ten, one hundred, and a thousand years from now, the place sleep has in our lives is bound to change in ways we can scarcely anticipate. As for today, having the right mattress and the right information on your own sleep patterns will put you on the path towards your own personal future full of calm, restful nights.
Atlanta-based Beautyrest® is one of the top mattress manufacturers in the United States, helping people sleep better for over 135 years.