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Jan 9, 2025
Sleep Tracking
Sleep tracking was basically the first time everyday people started keeping tabs on their brains, even if no one thought about it that way.
People didn’t obsess over sleep because they suddenly cared about REM percentages or HRV curves. They cared because sleep is a proxy for something much more important: how sharp you’ll be tomorrow. How well you’ll think, how focused you’ll stay, how stable your mood will be. Sleep has been the most accessible indirect measure of cognitive performance we’ve had.
Wearables like WHOOP and Oura understood this before anyone else. They weren’t really selling “rest”; they were selling a sense of control over the invisible ups and downs of your mind.
But sleep is still just a lagging indicator. It’s downstream of all the neural stuff that really determines how you function. The next wave won’t guess cognition from sleep patterns, it’ll measure cognition directly.