Sleeping too hot? Dr. Brad Younggren, CEO and co-founder of Circulate Health and an expert in healthspan and longevity, shares why Eight Sleep’s temperature-regulating mattress cover is the upgrade he trusts for better quality rest and a longer, healthier life.
A bed cover that can cool one side of the bed at a time and gently heat up in the morning may sound like a high-tech luxury. For Dr. Brad Younggren, it fits into a much bigger goal: getting better sleep as a part of having a longer, healthier life.
“From a sleep perspective, I think Eight is amazing, personally,” says Younggren, CEO and co-founder of longevity-focused Circulate Health. “It’s sort of a cooling pad that can help regulate your temperature and wake you up in the morning, because body temperature and the temperature in your bed actually make a significant difference in the impact on the quality of sleep.”
Younggren’s interest in health technology began long before his current work in healthspan and longevity. It was through experience in the military doing emergency medicine work that he realized the potential of technology to benefit patients not just in disaster-medicine situations or clinical settings. It led him into the longevity and healthspan space.
“As a CEO in the longevity space, I’ve got a fairly complicated regimen, also as a physician,” he says. “I think that diet, sleep and exercise are the cornerstones and should be for everyone as a baseline. Even today, I tend to focus mostly on this idea that we’re just mostly here talking about: How do we improve the quality of human life?”
Bells and whistles for better sleep
Eight Sleep’s selling point is that you can really dial in every aspect of your sleep environment — for you and your partner. Its features include dual-side temperature control, a thermal wake-up alarm, and an app that lets you track your REM data points.
“It’s got a cooling mechanism pad that sits on your bed, and it allows you to have temperature control on your side of the bed even if you have a partner in the bed,” Younggren says. “Everyone can have their own customized experience: Some people run hotter in beds than others, and so on.”
He also cites its temperature-driven wake-up alarm as a major plus. “It kind of warms up in the morning to wake you up by sort of matching sleep rhythms — it’s really impressive.”
Plus, “there’s an app that gives you sleep scores and stuff, which I refuse to look at, but I know a lot of people love it,” Younggren says. “A lot of people love it. People use a variety of sleep trackers. I actually can’t. I have that orthosomnia problem where, if I’m monitoring sleep trackers, it actually negatively impacts my sleep.
“I learned that I’m not alone in that. There are certain people who really can have difficulty falling asleep if they know they’re monitoring their sleep,” he says. “I used to, but I find my sleep’s even better just using Eight Sleep and not monitoring at all.”
Sleep quantity versus quality: Which one is better?
“I think the science behind [Eight Sleep] is solid,” Younggren says. “The whole idea is how to get the highest quality of sleep possible — it’s not just about how many hours a night.
“People have a bit of variability as it relates to what’s the optimal amount of sleep. We do have some sense where it probably lives for most people, but there are even people who live outside those standard deviations of what we expect. I kind of know where I live, and then I think that Eight Sleep is another methodology to improve the quality of the sleep, to maximize the sleep, maximize your REM, maximize your deep sleep.”
The biggest caveat? The price tag
As far as the performance and outcomes go, Younggren doesn’t have much to criticize.
“It does what it’s supposed to do,” he says. However, “it’s expensive: I think retail is like $3,000, so it’s not cheap.”
Still, with its durable design and all the new features they keep coming out with, he believes it’s worth the investment.
“I think that Eight Sleep is in the context of your lifetime of sleep. You would buy a mattress for X amount. You would buy a bed frame for X amount,” he says. “Why wouldn’t you buy the thing that’s going to ensure that you’re optimizing your sleep for your longevity?”
