About a year ago, after heeding the advice of celebrity athletes and billionaires alike, I strapped an Eight Sleep Pod 3 cover to my bed, downloaded the app to my phone, and hoped for the best. The results were a near-immediate improvement in my sleep. They were so universal in fact, that when I begrudgingly gave up my bed to my parents during a visit, my very offline dad—who once said he’d swap his iPhone for smoke signals if he could—wanted in on the techiest thing in sleep. Then came the Eight Sleep Pod 4 cover, and again, my sleep was revolutionized through a completely redesigned mattress cover and an app. While Dad’s review is forthcoming, mine is here for your consideration before purchase.
Specs
- Sizes Available: Queen, king, California king
- Warranty: 5 years
- Return Policy: 30 days
- Special Features: Automatic temperature control, dual climate control, vibration and thermal alarm, snore detection, phone-free control
What Is Eight Sleep?
For those unfamiliar with the premise of the Eight Sleep Pod, it’s a smart mattress cover that fits over your mattress like a fitted sheet. It has built-in tubing through which water travels to cool or warm the bed’s surface to keep your core body temperature optimized and sensors that track key sleep metrics. Those two things taken together are important because they link up to one another to work something like this: You hit the hay and the mattress sensors are constantly reading metrics like your heart rate and breathing. If you turn on the Autopilot feature via the app, for example, the AI-driven recommendations take the temperature up and down at different times during the night to help you wake up feeling refreshed.
While these temperature changes do make you more noticeably comfortable while you’re trying to go to sleep, they also are meant to help you get better sleep. Research indicates that heat is enemy number one when it comes to getting poor sleep, causing deleterious effects on sleep stages such as REM and slow-wave. One of the first praises that many people sing of the Pod 4 is that it helps them go to sleep faster and sink into a deeper sleep that isn’t constantly battling heat cues to wake them up.
I figure that the Pod 5, 6, or 7 may come up with an ingenious way to lose the “hub,” a bulky-ish water tank central processor that is the command center for all of this temperature-regulating magic, but the Pod 4 still is connected to it, so you should account for a place to put this in your bedroom (under a bedside table or beside it, for example).
What’s the Deal With the Eight Sleep App
It’s worth taking a beat to tell you a little about the app itself which is one of my favorite parts of the whole system. The app (available on iOS and Android) scores your sleep based on three key inputs: how well you stick to your sleep schedule, the quality of your sleep, and time you slept.
Sleeping Schedule
Research seems to suggest health benefits for people who follow a dedicated sleep-wake schedule. In practice, that means you’re diligent and disciplined about a bedtime and you don’t mess around by hitting snooze when your alarm rings the next morning. This is so advanced that the Eight Sleep app actually hits you with a reminder about bedtime 30 minutes before it’s time for your regularly scheduled programming. To track this, the new pod will monitor the time you got in and out of bed, the time you fell asleep, and the time time you wake up.
Sleep Quality
The quality of your sleep is dictated by in-depth biometrics such as heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, and respiratory rate. The sleep tracking device takes all of these into consideration to see how long you were in different stages of sleep: deep sleep, REM sleep, and light sleep. My app fully trolls me on nights when I have a couple of glasses of wine with a push notification in the morning asking if I feel less rested because my heart rate was above average.
Time Spent Asleep
Much to my chagrin, the Eight Sleep rigidly docks your sleep if you fall below seven hours or above nine hours—both of which I have done on occasion. This is the metric that I tend to have the most beef with, as different sleep doctors have told me that your sleep benchmark is completely unique to you. And as Dakota Johnson reminded us last year—some of us just need more ZZZs.
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