What happens at night
Sleep architecture
Stages, timing, regularity, and how accurately consumer devices estimate any of it.
- Sleep stages and cycles
- Regularity versus duration
- Tracker validation
- Insomnia treatment
This week
Sleepmaxxing built an industry on top of advice that costs nothing
The trend brought welcome attention to rest. It also stacked genuinely supported practices with unsupported ones and sold the whole bundle at once.
Focus
Sleep and recovery
Bias
Toward the boring basics
Caution
Tracking has costs
Rule
No sponsored content
What we cover
Rest is the most researched and most commercialised part of health. We separate the two.
Between the efforts
Recovery and the nervous system
Heart rate variability, thermal exposure, readiness scores, and what recovery actually means physiologically.
- Heart rate variability
- Sauna and cold exposure
- Readiness scores
- Cognitive rest
The hours before bed
Evening protocols
Light, temperature, and the supplement stack that has grown around bedtime.
- Evening light exposure
- Room temperature
- Magnesium and L-theanine
- Wind-down routines
Recently reviewed
Each piece gets re-read when new trial data lands. Filter by section to see what changed.
Sleep architectureSleepmaxxing built an industry on top of advice that costs nothing
The trend brought welcome attention to rest. It also stacked genuinely supported practices with unsupported ones and sold the whole bundle at once.
Recovery and the nervous systemYour HRV swings 20 to 40 percent day to day. That is normal.
Heart rate variability is a genuinely useful signal read over weeks and a nearly useless one read every morning.
Sleep architectureOrthosomnia: when tracking your sleep starts damaging it
Clinicians have been describing this for years. The trend that made sleep tracking universal made the problem larger.
Evening protocolsGrading the bedtime supplement stack
Magnesium, L-theanine, apigenin, tart cherry and the rest, sorted by how much human evidence sits behind each.
Sleep architectureRegularity beats duration, and the cohort data is unusually clear
Irregular sleep timing is associated with cardiovascular events independently of how long people sleep. It is also the cheapest thing to fix.
Recovery and the nervous systemA readiness score is a product opinion, not a measurement
Two devices reading the same body produce different scores because they weight inputs differently. Neither weighting has been validated against outcomes.
What we are working on
Stories in progress, with roughly where they stand. Vote to tell the desk what to prioritise.
Publishing soon
Mouth taping: the evidence, the risk, and why clinicians keep objecting
In review
Sleep divorce, renamed and reconsidered
Drafting
Shift work and the limits of circadian adaptation
Researching
Does a cooling mattress do anything a cheaper room cannot
Write for us
We publish sleep scientists, behavioural sleep medicine clinicians, physiologists, and people who have read the tracker validation literature.
Sleep science
Architecture, circadian timing, regularity, and what the polysomnography literature says about consumer estimates of all three.
Recovery physiology
Heart rate variability, autonomic balance, thermal exposure, and the difference between a recovery score and recovery.
Behaviour and habit
Why the interventions with the strongest evidence are the hardest to sell, and how people actually adopt them.
What we will and will not publish
- Claims must trace to a named trial, review, registry entry, or regulator document.
- Pieces run 1,200 to 2,500 words and say plainly where the evidence is thin.
- No paid placements, no affiliate copy dressed as reporting, no brand-supplied claims.
- Any commercial relationship, including free product, is disclosed in the byline.
Editors' picks
Longer pieces we keep sending people back to.
Sleep architectureSleepmaxxing built an industry on top of advice that costs nothing
The trend brought welcome attention to rest. It also stacked genuinely supported practices with unsupported ones and sold the whole bundle at once.
Sleep architectureOrthosomnia: when tracking your sleep starts damaging it
Clinicians have been describing this for years. The trend that made sleep tracking universal made the problem larger.
Recovery and the nervous systemYour HRV swings 20 to 40 percent day to day. That is normal.
Heart rate variability is a genuinely useful signal read over weeks and a nearly useless one read every morning.