145: Aaron Bromberg, CEO of StimScience. Somnee: First Electronic Sleep Aid Headband — 1.5x More Effective Than Ambien?!

WWelcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My name is Molly Eastman. I am the founder of sleep as a skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about.

sleep. Each week I'll be interviewing world class experts ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keep.

Keeping you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health. And by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My guest today is going to introduce us to a new piece of tech. That I'm pretty interested in. I see a lot of different pieces of sleep tech come my way and a lot of them are, might be different iterations of things that we already have or, you know, just, I see a lot of tech and this is one of the first ones that is standing out to me as something that's could be worth getting excited about.

So what I want to say about that is one, I had the opportunity to tour. Their sleep labs in Berkeley, which was a fascinating experience. And so they have been hard at work for years looking at how could transcranial electric stimulation potentially serve in our ability to both fall asleep and stay asleep and potentially improve sleep duration.

I will also note that many of you who might be tuning into this have probably heard of Matthew Walker, the creator of Why We Sleep, you know, the runaway bestseller. If you're at all interested in sleep, it's likely you've stumbled upon that book. But beyond that has just done a incredible amount of research in this area as far as looking at sleep and helping us to better  And so he is on the science advisor for SOMNI.

So, you know, just, there's some things afoot, some buzz afoot for this product. And I'm actually having the opportunity to test it right now. And I have seen some interesting changes in my own sleep, like some of that improved ability to both fall asleep a little bit of enhancement so far on duration and, uh, Apparently, it appears to learn more about you as you keep using it, and we'll get into all of the details on all of that.

But first I do want to share with you a little bit about who we're going to be speaking with. Aaron Bromberg is the CEO of StemScience, Creative Resomni, as I shared, and he has over 16 years of experience launching and managing new hardware and software products that Amazon, Bose and other startups. He earned his bachelor's in operations research from Cornell University and an MBA from Duke University.

Aaron joined STEM science to apply his experience with consumer devices to help people to sleep better and to use neuroscience to improve their lives. Now, beyond that. I'm not affiliated with Somni beyond getting to have the opportunity to test out their product. They did send that over to me to be able to experiment with that on my own.

And for all of you, they did set us up with a bit of a discount if you do want to give it a shot. So it's at trysomni. com. Somni. com forward slash sleep as a skill. And for anything that we might speak to on this podcast, or if you just want some inspiration on different things that you might be able to explore to help support your sleep, we do have a sleep store on sleep as a skill.

com. So if you haven't checked out our website, get on over to that website. At the very least, we'd love to have you on the newsletter. It goes on every single Monday for over five years. Sleep obsessions is the name of that. So please get yourself on over there. Not to mention a free downloadable PDF to optimize your bedroom.

You can take a sleep assessment and get some free things back, uh, that are tailored to you to help support your journey with improving your sleep. Cause I'm assuming that's why you're listening to this podcast, right?  So be sure to take those steps if you haven't already. And without further ado, we're going to jump into the podcast, but first a few words from our sponsors.

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com forward slash sleep as a skill. I will also include this in the show notes as well.  And welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. I have been personally waiting for this episode for a while. I had the privilege of getting to tour the sleep labs for Somni over in Berkeley, which was fascinating. All thanks to Aaron.

Aaron, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Awesome to be here. Thanks so much, Molly. I'm excited as well. Yeah, yeah, I had a blast with you. That was so cool to get to have that opportunity to see you know where you guys have been spending so much time for the past bunch of years going in deep on this topic of sleep and really one of the more noteworthy Yeah, yeah.

products that I've seen that really stands out from the pack, just from a number of pieces, you know, and it's novelty. And then of course, I've said this on social and what have you, with the element that you have Dr. Matthew Walker as your science advisor, which doesn't hurt anyone. So all of those cool aspects going on, but not to mention your published research in some of the results that you've gleaned through this product.

So Enough about all that. So what are we talking about? Somni, Aaron, tell me how you got into this world of really having this unique products that appears that it could really support people with their sleep. Yeah, thank you so much for for that intro. And, um, and thanks for visiting us in Berkeley. We loved having you and  being able to spend time in person.

That was great.  So,  you know, Somni is the only  headband, the only sleep aid to use personalized neuroscience, personalized brain stimulation to improve sleep. It's something that we've been working on as a company for years and years now since our founding in 2018. The company was actually started up by a few professors at UC Berkeley who are our science advisors.

Um, and they thought one of them is Matt Walker, obviously, many of your listeners will be familiar with him, um, and his book, Love of Sleep. He is, you know, an incredible evangelist for the importance of sleep, but also an incredible sleep scientist. I mean, he really is an academic researcher on the science of sleep.

But we also have science advisors on our advisory board who are... Equally well known in their domains of cognitive measurement and non invasive brain stimulation and these, uh, academics and, and professors wanted to put their expertise together to try to do something about sleep deprivation. And so we started out.

By studying the effects of brain stimulation on sleep, and to do that, we opened a sleep lab in our office in Berkeley, California, and started bringing in people to.  Assess the effects of different types of brain stimulation on their sleep and we looked at everything we looked at, you know, all different types of brain stimulation, different protocols and times of day, different, you know, different variables in how it would affect their sleep.

And we did that research in the lab for over 2 years. Before we really, uh, identified the core mechanism to optimize and improve sleep, which is, uh, what's the result, which resulted insomnia. So what we found after all of that research is that with a 15 minute personalized stem session at bedtime,  we can cut the time that it takes you to fall asleep at half.

And we can improve the quality of that whole night's sleep session by more than any sleeping pill, by more than four times what you get from taking a melatonin pill. Um, so, you know, I can talk in a ton of detail about the science behind that and how that works, but that's really the core, um, value proposition of our sleep aid sodomy is you just put it on at bedtime.

You wear it for 15 minutes, you get a 15 minute personalized stem session at the end of the 15 minutes. You don't have to wear it all night. You take it off and put it on the bed stand, but it improves the whole night's sleep. Um, so you can think of it almost like an electronic sleeping pill, but without any of the nasty side effects that you get from taking, you know, a prescription sleeping pill and feeling hung over the next day.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. So I even personally have my own a bunch of questions because we were sharing before we hit record. I have had the opportunity to now start testing this. I'm a weekend, so I'm a newbie, but it's been exciting because already I have had now I have a ton of variables that we were discussing since a lot of listeners and people in our newsletter know that I travel a bunch and have a lot of things going on a lot of testing of lots of different sleep items.

But since adding in the sound of the last week, one of the things that I have noticed is that it's been that fast kind of sleep onset. There has been this decent element of sleep duration at play. And then that sleep quality, all of those things have been ticking the boxes. So I'm really curious to keep following, um, to keep using this because I want to see like what does develop because out of the research that I've seen for, it seems like it continues to improve over time with usage.

So I have a lot of questions for myself and then for other clients. And for the listeners at large, because when you say things like digital sleeping pill or what have you, that is like a lot of ears go up. And I have a lot of interest in that too, because I have very big concerns around things like the benzos for sleep, Z drugs for sleep.

And we see so many people go down those paths. So we want the worst.  worse. So we want to have other options for people that are suffering. And then also for those particular challenges that people might be up against. I know you, my understanding is you have some interactivity with people that have challenging sleep schedules, shift workers, etc.

So this can be really, really important. So beginning at the beginning one, why does this work? What is going on? Because there's times I have it like on my head and it's, you know, it's doing like the little stimulator. You can feel it going. And my question is what is happening? What is going on?  Yeah. So, you know, most people, when they think of sleep, they think about the sleep environment, right?

Like how dark is your room? How soft is your pillow? How warm is your covers, et cetera, et cetera.  The reality is sleep is a brain activity.  It's literally a series of patterns in your brain as you transition from your high frequency wake activity, um, through stages that are the stages of sleep that you're probably familiar with that are correspondingly  lower frequencies and more predictable brain activities down to deep sleep, which is The, um, stage of sleep that's considered to be the most restorative and, um, and beneficial to immune health, et cetera.

And so everybody goes through those stages of sleep, but the details of what's going on in your brain during those stages are unique to you, just like your thumbprint.  Yeah. So, um, as you're starting to doze off. You have a characteristic brain rhythm, for example, called alpha, which is just a brain frequency, but your alpha frequency might be 10 hertz, and mine is 9 hertz.

That's a little difference that makes a big difference when you're trying to neuromodulate or stimulate the brain. What SOMNI does,  It has a built in sensor to read brain activity. It detects your individual sleep signature, the unique set of frequencies and patterns that your brain makes that correspond to healthy sleep for you.

And then it uses that 15 minutes of very gentle electrical stimulation to precisely mimic and enhance that sleep signature. So what it's doing is basically taking you when you get into bed over the course of the 15 minute stim session from your wake state to a state of optimal sleep readiness by nudging your brain.

Into that set of patterns that corresponds to, uh, to sleep. And so at the end of the session, like you said, you notice you're feeling more drowsy. Yeah. You're readier for sleep. And also your brain is prepared for a healthy, long, uh, deep night of sleep. So interesting and because I've been talking about this product more recently, especially after having gone had the opportunity to see the lab and what's happening and just the excitement around this product.

So I've spoken with different people and some of the things that come back from my conversations are people saying, Oh, I don't want to have to have something on my head while I sleep. And then I say, Oh, no, it's only 15 minutes before bed. They love hearing that. Then I've had other people say things like, oh, well, I did transcranial magnetic stimulation and this messed me up, or I had problems, or what have you.

What is the distinction between that and what you have created? Yeah, like I said, early on when we were doing our research, we tested all sorts of different stimulation mechanisms, including, you know, TMS, but also like audio stimulation or touch stimulation, et cetera. And what we found is that Electrical stimulation is the most practical and most effective in terms of helping sleep  without any, um, significant effects.

So what it's doing,

if you look at, if you look at actually what's happening in your brain, it's having brain waves that originate in your  prefrontal cortex, which is your forehead, and they just go front to back. Um, while you're sleeping, you have, you know, very oscillatory predictable brain activity that's going through the back.

So we apply a little bit of electrical current. And when I say a little bit, I'm talking about microamps of current. If you've used a, a tense muscle stimulator, like you can get from Best Buy, it's an order of magnitude less current than that. So it's really, really low level,  um, current, but it's just enough to create a small electrical field.

in your prefrontal cortex that initiates this brain activity. So it corresponds basically perfectly to what your brain wants to do naturally when it's asleep.  So interesting. Okay. And for people that have You know, those safety concerns, I know we've already addressed too, that's so kind of a slow level and has been tested.

I saw you had some research on your site speaking to the safety profile of bringing this in, but just kind of re underscoring for people that say, Oh, well, we don't know so much about the brain and just zap in the brain and you know, all these things, how do we further just quell those fears? It's, I mean, I understand it, it's, it sounds a little weird when you first hear about it, right?

It certainly did to me when I first, yeah, so I totally understand, you know, having a little bit of, uh, of hesitation here, but the reality is. The core technology here, this using very low level of electrical stimulation to stimulate your brain transcranially, that's been used for decades to treat depression and to treat other neurological conditions.

There have been over 500 academics. and clinical studies, including FDA studies, and they found no major side effects for this type of treatment. And, you know, I'd just go back to where you started out talking about, um, sleeping pills. Consider the alternative, what people are doing to try to improve their sleep.

This is actually a much more direct and natural way of getting the brain into a state of sleep readiness, it's so much safer than, you know, taking, uh, Ambien or taking NyQuil every night or Benadryl every night or any of the other myriad nasty chemical solutions that people are adopting to try to improve their sleep.

Oh, absolutely. And to reiterate, so you said your findings is four times more effective than melatonin, two times more effective than CBTI, right? And was it 1. 5 more effective than Ambien? Yeah, exactly. That's measuring sleep quality or sleep efficiency. And, um, uh, you know, and again, the big  value relative to Ambien or some of these other.

You know, medications is there's no hangover effect the next day. There's no, um, risk of addiction. There's no other long term, uh, side effects to it. So it's a lot safer. Right. And then for anyone before they start freaking out about the statement about the CBT I, it can be done in tandem with CBT I. It's not what we're saying like, oh, skip the learning and whatever.

It's that we can do it in addition to some of those healthy habits. Absolutely. I, as you know, I'm sure a lot of people don't have access to, um, to CBTI, or they have licenses that don't allow them to adopt a lot of the, the behavioral changes that are, um, you know, recommended in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.

And so, you know, for them, somny can be an alternative, but we've had a lot of customers and actually.  Sleep coaches and CBTI practitioners that have said, Oh, this is really interesting because it could be a great compliment or it could be something that people use for a while as they're preparing for a, you know, a six or eight week course of CBTI.

So we don't see ourselves as really trying to displace any other. Sleep behavior or, um, or sleep aid that any of our customers are using with the exception of some of those sleeping pills that have the side effects and really, you know, don't have, in our opinion, a place in  the sleep aid market.

Absolutely. Oh my gosh. Yeah, we've For anyone listening, we've done a number of episodes on that exact topic, and we have a lot of concerns, and there's even non profits that we've brought on that dedicate their whole mission to educating on some of the deleterious effects of those drugs, so having some of these alternatives is a big deal, and it also just makes me think for the practical application of, you know, I work, I shared with you with a lot of high stakes poker players, and they've got all kinds of variable schedules, they're kind of extreme case, but the ability for them to have something in kind of their back pocket could be really beneficial and then they can stand as an example for other people that might have just more out of the box considerations or variable routines or high stress at certain periods of time that this could help support.

Yeah, totally. You know, one of the things that's nice about it, we have some Olympians that actually are are using the product, uh, Olympic athletes, um, and.  What they say is, you know, they've invested very heavily in sleep. They understand exactly how important it is and how related it is to their performance.

And they spent a ton of money and  a ton of time and effort on optimizing their sleep environment. But then they have to compete halfway around the world, so they have to fly and travel and all of a sudden they can't put their 2, 000 mattress and their whole bed stand into their carry on, but something they can throw in their carry on.

It's really easy to travel with. So it's nice for that. The other, um. A piece of it that we're working on is, you know, I mean, poker players is obviously a cool, very niche market, but reality is there's 19 million Americans that are professionally sleep deprived. Absolutely, uh, you know, either shift work or have, um, uh, schedules a regular

predictable, uh, uh, sleep schedule. And. If you think about the careers that have that, um, sleep challenge, it includes members of the military. It includes pilots and, um, and truck drivers. It includes first responders and, um, uh, E. R. workers. These are not people that you want to be. Sleep deprived, right?

These are people that are in important life or death situations. And yet they're trying to do it  with with insomnia or clinical sleep deprivation. And so, um, we're really excited about, uh, within our company about using SOMNY to improve sleep for those people that have that professional. Um, obligation or career driven, uh, sleep deprivation.

And so we've been working on features that are specifically tuned to night shift workers where they can toggle,  um, the settings in the app to let us know their sleep schedule so that we can then, you know, optimize the stimulation based on the time of day that they're going to sleep versus if they want to take a nap in the middle of the night to prepare them for.

Um, their next shift or things like that. Sure. Okay. So you're sharing about some of those people that have really some absolutely special considerations for their sleep and that this could be supportive. I'm curious for people that just out of pragmatics that sometimes they might say if they miss a dosing or two of somny based on just they get home and they just fall right asleep or whatever happens, is that problematic?

For the effectiveness of something that needs to be something where it's like all the time. What do you see there? Yeah, no, not at all. We have a lot of people. A lot of our customers that use it. Um, uh, you know, somewhat frequently, but not every night. We have a lot of people use.  During the week and then on weekends, they don't just because of, you know, whatever lifestyle they have or the traveling, whatever.

And it's, it's no problem at all.  We, uh, uh, we tune it so that it's always ready to improve your sleep on nights that you use it  on other nights. If you don't use it, it's going to not have. a positive effect, but it won't have a negative effect. Okay, and then is it important in the first period as it's kind of like learning about you to try to have the adherence for the first like three weeks or so?

Is that beneficial or what do you see? Yeah, we recommend for especially for people that are just ramping up in their first to  use it for a few nights in a row and the reasons for that are twofold. One, It is a it's an algorithm. It's a machine learning model. So it takes a few nights to learn your brain patterns and and tune in the personalization so that it can have an effect.

And the, um, the more people use it consecutively at the beginning, the better the model is able to. Uh, to run its personalization routine. The other reason is because it's just a change to your bedtime routine. And for anybody, that takes a little bit of getting used to. And once you get used to it, most people really like having somny as part of their bedtime routine.

It's actually, uh, kind of a nice, pleasant, um, break between daytime and bedtime. But, um, but we want people to... really have that consistent routine and kind of get over the hump initially so that they are prepared for a good night's sleep. Yeah, absolutely. And I was sharing with you that I've been really liking that process has this nice relaxing music and you have this kind of 15 minute intentional wind down.

That's happening and you can also do other things. You're not just like laying there. You can have all that music going. You can have that stimulation. And then I'm often on Kindle or whatever. And it's just like a nice present. Now my husband is like, Oh, we got the music going. Okay. Uh, so it's fun for the whole family.

And then the other couple of things too real quick is, um, because I got to kind of tuck your ear off when I had you for that period of time in your, in your lab, but for people listening, the sometimes some of the biohacker esque people then have concerns about EMFs  and Wi Fi and all those things. Can you share about that piece for any concerns?

Yeah, so it's a connected device. It connects to our cloud because that's where that  algorithm runs, personalize the, um, the stimulation, but we make sure that when it's on your head,  the wifi is turned off. So there is no, you know, wireless EMF. Close to the head. We know that's a concern for some people and we wanted to address that concern by automatically disabling the radio when it's on your on your head.

And then when you put it on the charger, that's when it'll phone home and connect to our cloud.  So great. Okay. And one of the other things we had talked about to that one for people to hear is of the landscape of this market. So this might be a whole new area for people to be hearing about. They might wonder, well, are there a lot of these, like, what is noteworthy about this?

And one of the things I got from you that this does, it doesn't appear that there's anything quite like this on the market. Can you just distinguish that a bit more as to why that's the case? Yeah, the biggest. Way that this is different from any other neurotechnology based headband is that it's it's what's called closed loop.

It's personalized. So there are headbands  that can read brain activity.  But they don't have the stimulation built in. They don't actually then change the state of the brain. And then there's some other products out there that, um, that do brain stimulation, but they're basically one frequency fits all.

They kind of go on and they use a default, uh, frequency for stimulation. That doesn't work for sleep. We actually had our science team, um, try that. We had a we had a broad pilot study where we tested the effects of personalization versus non personalized default simulation. What we saw is that with the non personalized approach.

There's really not a big effect on sleep, two, three minutes in sleep duration, but when it's personalized after just a week of the personalization, we saw anywhere between 20 and 40 minutes of additional sleep duration. So closed loop personalization is something that you only get from Somni.  We have a patent on that technology, but more importantly, we have.

All of the data, all of the years of research that's fed into this algorithm that we've created in order to do the personalization. So there's no one else that can do that.  And it really is what we found to be the key to having a positive effect on sleep. And it makes sense because everybody's brain is different.

Everybody's sleep routine is different. It needs to be personalized in order to Uh, to change and improve your sleep. Yeah, like, I wanted to check that I'm getting this right. One of the things that I've been saying to people is like, so you come home because we, as I'm talking to so many different clients around some of their personalized sleep challenges, they might say, Oh yeah, I'm, I'm good most of the week.

And then I go out with people and I come back home and I'm all just like amped up. And then I don't get to sleep till way later. And it's a whole problem, or they're stressing, or they're shift workers, or there's those extra, they're like just more amplified or the excitatory state in the brain. So I will say about Somni is that part of my understanding is on those nights it can also be beneficial because then it can see that it's kind of deviating from your normal brain activity and then help apply the things to bring you and down regulate you.

Is that accurate? Yeah, very accurate. So I'm a case study by the I'm someone who has a long history of struggling with sleep before, um, uh, before working at STEM science. And it was almost just what you described. It had, you know, general kind of anxiety induced insomnia where my mind would race at night and I would just have trouble kind of shutting off.

And I think that's pretty common. I've talked to a lot of people that have totally experienced that regularly or occasionally. And. Um, and I can tell you that it works. It really does help to suppress the brain activity that corresponds to racing thoughts and to enhance the brain activity that corresponds to feeling drowsy and ready for, um, for sleep.

And so, uh, when I wear my Somni, now I'm,  uh, I'm in a position now that is, I think, Objectively pretty high stress, right? Being  an early stage startup is not exactly like use it to  help these fleas, but I'm sleeping better than ever because I have some knee that can actually help to improve my sleep.

That's the and you got kids and you got the whole that's great. We love hearing that. And, you know, just for any of the listeners too, because I've been sharing, I've been aiming to do less and less product based podcasts often because I, you know, I don't want people to feel like, oh, I got to always buy all these things to.

But this is one that has stood out from the pack for me. And as of right now, I know we're going to set up some sort of promo code for people to, you know, have some sort of thing. But as of right now, as I'm talking, like I actually have no real connection beyond just being able to like have been testing it this more recent week.

So for me, it's just the novelty of one. I have that passion I've shared. about one, my concern when I had my sleep issues, one of the first things that I was given was sleeping pills. And I saw that with my family. And now since then, I've seen that with so many clients that now the downstream effects of some really detours in their life from taking these things.

So it's a huge piece of concern for me. And I'm just for the optimizers that maybe they're not dealing with that they they're sleeping, but they would like to sleep better. So I feel like there's a lot of application here. And one of the things I wanted to touch on too was like Some of the competitors that you're speaking to, some of the price tags on some of these things are quite high, whereas this one I feel like is more accessible to the average person.

Actually, I don't have the price, it's like around 300 or so, right? Something like that? It's 299 for the headband. 299, yeah. We want to, you know, I appreciate you saying that and I'm glad that we can kind of squeeze in on the, you know, the product focus podcast for you. I really,  it is a rare rarity. Yeah.

Cause I really, I have it that so many things we can do to improve our sleep are pretty much free or behavioral nature or. certain strategies and approaches or minimal costs or what have you, but then there are these standout things that can really provide a unique approach for people that are struggling or just would like to up level.

So I think that this appears to be one of them that's noteworthy. That's awesome. And we do, I talk to people every day. Customers that are, you know, like you said, they're motivated because they feel, um, dissatisfied with sleeping pills are addicted to sleeping pills. But I also talked a lot of customers that are, um, are not in that camp and they just want to have something to.

Improve their sleep. Actually, a lot of people that have have bought sleep trackers like, you know, I know you're a ring user like me totally. Um, but they start seeing their report and then what? Right? It's really hard to know what to do to actually, um, close the loop if you see an issue in your sleep report.

And so a lot of our customers will come to us and say, Oh, I need more sleep. Yeah. Yeah. Deep sleep or I'm my ring told me I need more sleep duration or, um, or what have you. And they've either, um, exhausted the behavioral changes that are kind of, you know, 10 tips and tricks that you see everywhere. Yeah.

Or they've, um, tried them and they haven't helped or they can't make those changes in some cases. Yeah. And so, Somni is just ready to help and meet you no matter where you are. Like, if you've got, you know, already have done all of the things that I'm sure you've done around improving your sleep environment, your sleep behaviors, et cetera, it'll still help to further improve your sleep and get you that last little, um, bit of optimal.

Sleep. But if you're like the, you know, majority of people that has more room for improvement for whatever reason, then you can start using sound me and make changes and improvements to your sleep behaviors and routine in parallel, and it will help to accelerate all of that. So it's really been just so rewarding  and how we've been changing their lives and how we've been improving not just their sleep, but their ability to.

Um, adopt lifestyle changes, uh, during their day around better exercise, better decision making, better relationships with family, better performance at work, et cetera, et cetera. So awesome. Uh, okay. So given that you have now, now you're getting this great sleep and you've now devoted your life to really diving into this topic, and you've been in this for now a bunch of years, people are likely to want to know the answers to these four questions that we ask everyone that comes on how they're managing their own.

sleep. So, looking forward to hearing what that looks like for you. So, every guest that we have come on, they answer these. And the first one is always, what does your nightly sleep routine look like? Right now, I'm assuming there's probably, I'm assuming I know one part of it, but you can let us know. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So, I, of course, use my Somni every night. And so, my Routine is, uh, you know, after I kind of brush my teeth and ready for bed, I'll, I'll climb into bed. I'll put on my, uh, my Somni and hit the button in the app for the 15 minute personalized them session. And then I'll, I'll read a book on my Kindle for the 15 minutes.

And, you know, as you indicated during that. Um, that STEM session, the app plays some chill spa music. It feels like a little mini vacation. And then I'll just be kind of enjoying and reading my book. And at the end of the 15 minutes, I'm usually still awake. Some nights I'll fall asleep during the STEM session, but most nights.

I'll, um, I'll just, you know, hear the music stop and, and feel the end of the STEM session and I'll take off my headband and put it on the charger on my bed stand and close my book and just go to sleep. So great. Okay. Simple, easy, and unique for those who are just learning about Somni, you know, now in this, in this conversation.

So that's awesome. And then. Our second question would be what is your morning quote unquote sleep routine look like with the argument that how we start our day can impact our sleep results? Yeah, so I've got a couple of kids so they tend to dominate the morning, you know, so  my morning routine is I'll, I'll get up and every morning I'll try to Hang out with the kids while they're getting ready for school and having their breakfast.

I'll make them a lunch in a lot of cases and  help to get them out the door. My wife is the one who does the drop offs in the morning and then once the kids are out the door. I, uh, make myself a double espresso and I will, um, sit and on most mornings, I'm, I'm lucky to be able to have my coffee and just read the news and sort of, um, ease into the day before my first meeting of the day.

Amazing. Okay, so you can have your double espresso and still sleep well at night. Love it.  Yes, I'm a big promoter of caffeine, by the way, so people don't have to feel like you have to get rid of all fun and joy in life to sleep well. I mean, I would say across the board, you know, like you and I have  Um,  so many of the, uh, the, so much of the sleep advice you hear out there is it just sounds like homework, you know, like you hear, you know, don't have coffee, don't have a glass of wine with dinner, you know, finish eating at 5 p.

m. or all of these things and it's all, you know, based on real science and there's a rationale for it, but, you Most people are never going to do that, myself included. So I, um, uh, I feel great about using SOMNI. It helps me to sleep well enough that I don't feel the need to, you know, constrain my lifestyle around.

sleep. I'll still enjoy a coffee in the afternoon or, you know, occasionally have a glass of wine with dinner and, um, uh, and still be able to sleep well. Yes. Love that. And then our next question would be, what might we see visually in your space on your nightstand or beyond? And also if you travel or whatever, you know, just anything that we might.

Wanna be aware of that, we would see. Yeah. So I've got, um, my, my insomnia with the charger. Uh, it sits on the nightstand. There's a,  a nice, um, charging cradle that the, the headband just drops into magnetically, so it's really easy to  charge. As an aside, one of the things that we learned when we were early in the process of developing and, um, creating the somnia headband is that.

Most people would rather experience physical pain than have another damn thing to plug in every day. Yes.  That's what led us to having this really easy magnetic charger. You just drop it in and you don't have to plug anything in. Anyhow, my bed stand's got my Somni charger. It has my My Kindle  and then just a, um, uh, night lamp and a, um, I use a,  uh, nest, um, with the screen for an alarm clock that, um, wakes me up in the morning and, you know, tells me the weather and stuff.

Awesome. No, that was actually, I think I was mentioning that to you before we hit record because that was one of the things I was concerned about because I have used some of these head based products in the past. And so. some of them would have like connectivity issues and all these things are just like a lot of steps.

And it's one of those things where hopefully we've done the work to set up a lifestyle where when sleep time comes that your sleep pressure is mounting and you kind of just don't want to deal with some of these things around those times. And that was one of the things I was happy about with the Somni was just really my experience has been.

the ease of being able to set those up without a lot of, I don't know, struggles. And I think that's important. Yeah, we worked with a really great team of designers that was very thoughtful about how's this gonna, how's this gonna fit into your life and be easy to use. And also, by the way, hopefully, you know, you would agree to make something that doesn't look like A neurotechnology.

It kind of looks, you know, uh, it looks like hopefully a piece of sleepwear that you are in her forehead rather than a, um, you know, a gadget that you have to put on. Totally. Yeah. The silk and the whole thing. Yeah. It's totally seamless and easy. So I'm excited about that. And also I haven't. Yet traveled with it, but to your point and since I do travel a lot I do like that.

It doesn't have a ton of like Accoutrements or all kinds of heavy big things that could be problematic to throwing into My luggage or what have you and actually originally when it first had come I was thinking of oh This will be like an at home thing that i'll use but now that i've been doing it I do foresee that I likely will very much take it and that could actually as we've been talking about Be even more important because oftentimes our sleep does tend to tank when we're on the road.

So that could be awesome.  So it's totally yes, so good. Okay, and uh to the point on all those factors around sleep one of our last questions is one where it kind of takes all the things you've learned and it's What would you say so far has made the biggest change to your sleep game or said another way?

Maybe biggest aha moment in managing your own sleep Yeah, well, look, I mean, I, I don't want to turn it into a, uh, Somni commercial  listeners can, you know, go to our website, try somni. com available to ship that, but the things outside of Somni that. Have really been game changers for me from a  sleep point of view.

One is the, the kind of repeatable sleep routine. I really do try to be, you know, very disciplined about, um, just following my. My plan every night and I recommend that to everybody the other change that I I made relatively recently that has made a big difference is like I said, I I read every night. Yeah, but I found that Um  certain types of books I was sleeping better than others and I started like really kind of like  For a while I was like keeping track and trying to create my little like, you know, Pandora of what books help me to sleep and what don't.

And what I found is that, um, reading sort of like, like popular science and just non fiction kind of books that  are, you know, a little bit boring, uh, really help me sleep because I never mind putting them down. But if I switch to something that's really character driven, then every once in a while I'll be, um, not disciplined enough and I'll just keep reading.

Yeah, of course. Yeah.  So, so I started. Like.  think about my reading list as, you know, like I'll keep track of books for bedtime versus books for, you know, for the beach or for personal reading pleasure. And that's actually helped a lot. Oh my God, that's so great. Because one of the things that we do with our programs are what we put under the framework of circadian rhythm and treatment.

And one of the kind of modules that we bring in is. Uh, thought timing and then the timing of the type of thoughts and that we're trying to have them be diurnal in nature So that we have like our day mode things and our night mode things You know training ourselves to be disciplined in the types of thoughts that we're engaging in And so by virtue of the things that we're taking in and or then the paths of thoughts that we're going down and so that's so great that you're really Looking at that and sculpting that to, you know, get the results that you want to have.

That's amazing. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And the way you put it is perfect. I really do find that, you know,  I'm the type of person that, um, I really get, I love reading and the books really get sort of, you know, like,  In fact, my brain and I think about a lot and so if it's something that I'm not,  you know, to personally invested in, then we will sleep a lot better.

And if it's something that, you know, like I said, if it's something where I just am invested in the story, I can't wait to find out what happens then. That's not a good book for me at nighttime. It's better. Totally. I know because that could seem counterintuitive. It's like, oh, well, it's an exciting thing.

It's a happy thing. Like, not a problem. But then we see that you stress like EU stress still being maybe the opposite of what we'd like to be cultivating at just that time frame of the night. So that's really great. And lastly,  so and you know, again, we were talking about How our aim is for largely, we're doing a lot less product, you know, podcasts, and yet this one has stood out.

So I would assume that people listening might say, Oh my gosh, okay, I want to look at this. I want to test this for myself, or maybe, you know, my husband is a shift worker or whatever the application is. So in that case, you know, one of the things that we think is really important is to then have some of those options to your point of instead of going down the path of the pharmaceuticals or over the counter sleep aids or beyond, then to have other things that they can do.

So how can they test out Somni or follow the work you're doing? Yeah, that's awesome. Anyone can go and order somny from our website. It's try somny, t r y s o m n e e. com and everyone gets a 30 night sleep well guarantee. You can try it for 30 days. If for whatever reason, you know, it doesn't fit in your routine, you don't feel like it's helping, you don't like the way it looks, whatever it is, you just send it back to us, we'll even pay for return shipping.

So no risk to, um, to giving it a shot. Um, and then they can also learn more about. Uh, about the science behind SOMNY on our website, we have pages dedicated to our research and to learn about the team behind the product as well as hear from customers and hear some of the great stories that, um, uh, that members of what we call the one hour club, uh, said about the product, those are customers that tell us that they've SOMNY.

com. Uh, added an hour or more to their sleep duration. Yes. The one hour club. Yeah. I love when you were speaking about that. I've shared that with some other people too, because some people, you know, when I first started talking about it, they're like, Oh, well, I don't have problems falling asleep or anything.

So it's not for me. But then you're like, well, it's the sleep onset piece, sleep duration, sleep efficiency. It kind of hits at just about every component of what we'd like to see for improving sleep. So. Really cool that that component. So what I want to say is I want to thank you so much for one, taking the time to on the, from a personal note of bringing me around to your sleep lab and introducing me to your whole team.

It was just incredible. And then giving the opportunity to test this out because, you know, I really, it was, I had come back from traveling. And I had the stack of things that had come in to test for sleep. And yet yours was like the one that I was most excited about. So I genuinely am excited to continue on with this.

I've already had great results so far in the short time I've been using it. So I'm looking forward to more too. And yeah, just really appreciate you taking the time and sharing what you've been discovering that could help people. Thanks so much for saying that and for having me on Molly. It's been a real pleasure to spend time with you.

And, you know, our mission is to end sleep deprivation and you're doing a great job of helping all of your listeners, um, to, uh, improve their sleep as well. So congratulations on all your success. And, um, to  partner with you going forward. We're more than happy to. Awesome. Oh, well, thank you so much. Such aligned missions.

So here's to helping people sleep better. And thanks so much again.  You've been listening to the sleep as a skill podcast, the top podcast for people who want to take their sleep skills to the next level. Every Monday, I send out the sleep obsessions newsletter, which aims to be one of the most obsessive newsletters on the planet.

Fun fact, I've never missed a Monday for over five years and counting. And it contains everything that you need to know in the fascinating world of sleep. Head on over to sleepisaskill. com forward slash newsletter to sign up. 

elcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My name is Molly Eastman. I am the founder of sleep as a skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about.

sleep. Each week I'll be interviewing world class experts ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keep.

Keeping you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health. And by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My guest today is going to introduce us to a new piece of tech. That I'm pretty interested in. I see a lot of different pieces of sleep tech come my way and a lot of them are, might be different iterations of things that we already have or, you know, just, I see a lot of tech and this is one of the first ones that is standing out to me as something that's could be worth getting excited about.

So what I want to say about that is one, I had the opportunity to tour. Their sleep labs in Berkeley, which was a fascinating experience. And so they have been hard at work for years looking at how could transcranial electric stimulation potentially serve in our ability to both fall asleep and stay asleep and potentially improve sleep duration.

I will also note that many of you who might be tuning into this have probably heard of Matthew Walker, the creator of Why We Sleep, you know, the runaway bestseller. If you're at all interested in sleep, it's likely you've stumbled upon that book. But beyond that has just done a incredible amount of research in this area as far as looking at sleep and helping us to better  And so he is on the science advisor for SOMNI.

So, you know, just, there's some things afoot, some buzz afoot for this product. And I'm actually having the opportunity to test it right now. And I have seen some interesting changes in my own sleep, like some of that improved ability to both fall asleep a little bit of enhancement so far on duration and, uh, Apparently, it appears to learn more about you as you keep using it, and we'll get into all of the details on all of that.

But first I do want to share with you a little bit about who we're going to be speaking with. Aaron Bromberg is the CEO of StemScience, Creative Resomni, as I shared, and he has over 16 years of experience launching and managing new hardware and software products that Amazon, Bose and other startups. He earned his bachelor's in operations research from Cornell University and an MBA from Duke University.

Aaron joined STEM science to apply his experience with consumer devices to help people to sleep better and to use neuroscience to improve their lives. Now, beyond that. I'm not affiliated with Somni beyond getting to have the opportunity to test out their product. They did send that over to me to be able to experiment with that on my own.

And for all of you, they did set us up with a bit of a discount if you do want to give it a shot. So it's at trysomni. com. Somni. com forward slash sleep as a skill. And for anything that we might speak to on this podcast, or if you just want some inspiration on different things that you might be able to explore to help support your sleep, we do have a sleep store on sleep as a skill.

com. So if you haven't checked out our website, get on over to that website. At the very least, we'd love to have you on the newsletter. It goes on every single Monday for over five years. Sleep obsessions is the name of that. So please get yourself on over there. Not to mention a free downloadable PDF to optimize your bedroom.

You can take a sleep assessment and get some free things back, uh, that are tailored to you to help support your journey with improving your sleep. Cause I'm assuming that's why you're listening to this podcast, right?  So be sure to take those steps if you haven't already. And without further ado, we're going to jump into the podcast, but first a few words from our sponsors.

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This sparkling water laced with a unique blend of amino acids and minerals synergizes with your body's natural metabolism to decelerate the sugar absorption from your meals, ensuring a smoother, steadier blood sugar response. Now you may ask, how does that connect to sleep? Well, it's simple. Unstable blood sugar levels can lead to restless nights, frequent wake ups, a top complaint that I hear from many of you, and even nightmares.

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So visit www. goodidea. com and use the code sleep 10 for a 10 percent discount on your first order. Now invest in better sleep and in turn in a better, more energized life.  As we head into the fall and vacation season winds down, i. e. a time when late nights, irregular eating habits, and indulgence tend to become the norm, it's time to get back on track with our health and of course, our sleep.

Just a quick, interesting fact about sleep to mention, drinking more than two servings of alcohol per day for men and more than one serving per day for women can decrease sleep quality by 39. 2%. A sleep foundation survey reports, not even mentioning all the indulgent food and late night effects that often come along with it.

And as we know, sleep is the key to your body's rejuvenation and repair process. It controls hunger and weight loss, hormones, boost energy levels and impacts countless. Other functions, a good night's sleep will improve your wellbeing much more than just about anything else I can possibly think of on the planet.

You know, I'm biased, but got to say that and sleep is your major to focus on as we head into the fall season and hopefully beyond.  And that's why I recommend that if you're going to start taking some supplements on your sleep, often magnesium is a great place to begin, but not just any magnesium supplement.

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com forward slash sleep as a skill. I will also include this in the show notes as well.  And welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. I have been personally waiting for this episode for a while. I had the privilege of getting to tour the sleep labs for Somni over in Berkeley, which was fascinating. All thanks to Aaron.

Aaron, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Awesome to be here. Thanks so much, Molly. I'm excited as well. Yeah, yeah, I had a blast with you. That was so cool to get to have that opportunity to see you know where you guys have been spending so much time for the past bunch of years going in deep on this topic of sleep and really one of the more noteworthy Yeah, yeah.

products that I've seen that really stands out from the pack, just from a number of pieces, you know, and it's novelty. And then of course, I've said this on social and what have you, with the element that you have Dr. Matthew Walker as your science advisor, which doesn't hurt anyone. So all of those cool aspects going on, but not to mention your published research in some of the results that you've gleaned through this product.

So Enough about all that. So what are we talking about? Somni, Aaron, tell me how you got into this world of really having this unique products that appears that it could really support people with their sleep. Yeah, thank you so much for for that intro. And, um, and thanks for visiting us in Berkeley. We loved having you and  being able to spend time in person.

That was great.  So,  you know, Somni is the only  headband, the only sleep aid to use personalized neuroscience, personalized brain stimulation to improve sleep. It's something that we've been working on as a company for years and years now since our founding in 2018. The company was actually started up by a few professors at UC Berkeley who are our science advisors.

Um, and they thought one of them is Matt Walker, obviously, many of your listeners will be familiar with him, um, and his book, Love of Sleep. He is, you know, an incredible evangelist for the importance of sleep, but also an incredible sleep scientist. I mean, he really is an academic researcher on the science of sleep.

But we also have science advisors on our advisory board who are... Equally well known in their domains of cognitive measurement and non invasive brain stimulation and these, uh, academics and, and professors wanted to put their expertise together to try to do something about sleep deprivation. And so we started out.

By studying the effects of brain stimulation on sleep, and to do that, we opened a sleep lab in our office in Berkeley, California, and started bringing in people to.  Assess the effects of different types of brain stimulation on their sleep and we looked at everything we looked at, you know, all different types of brain stimulation, different protocols and times of day, different, you know, different variables in how it would affect their sleep.

And we did that research in the lab for over 2 years. Before we really, uh, identified the core mechanism to optimize and improve sleep, which is, uh, what's the result, which resulted insomnia. So what we found after all of that research is that with a 15 minute personalized stem session at bedtime,  we can cut the time that it takes you to fall asleep at half.

And we can improve the quality of that whole night's sleep session by more than any sleeping pill, by more than four times what you get from taking a melatonin pill. Um, so, you know, I can talk in a ton of detail about the science behind that and how that works, but that's really the core, um, value proposition of our sleep aid sodomy is you just put it on at bedtime.

You wear it for 15 minutes, you get a 15 minute personalized stem session at the end of the 15 minutes. You don't have to wear it all night. You take it off and put it on the bed stand, but it improves the whole night's sleep. Um, so you can think of it almost like an electronic sleeping pill, but without any of the nasty side effects that you get from taking, you know, a prescription sleeping pill and feeling hung over the next day.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. So I even personally have my own a bunch of questions because we were sharing before we hit record. I have had the opportunity to now start testing this. I'm a weekend, so I'm a newbie, but it's been exciting because already I have had now I have a ton of variables that we were discussing since a lot of listeners and people in our newsletter know that I travel a bunch and have a lot of things going on a lot of testing of lots of different sleep items.

But since adding in the sound of the last week, one of the things that I have noticed is that it's been that fast kind of sleep onset. There has been this decent element of sleep duration at play. And then that sleep quality, all of those things have been ticking the boxes. So I'm really curious to keep following, um, to keep using this because I want to see like what does develop because out of the research that I've seen for, it seems like it continues to improve over time with usage.

So I have a lot of questions for myself and then for other clients. And for the listeners at large, because when you say things like digital sleeping pill or what have you, that is like a lot of ears go up. And I have a lot of interest in that too, because I have very big concerns around things like the benzos for sleep, Z drugs for sleep.

And we see so many people go down those paths. So we want the worst.  worse. So we want to have other options for people that are suffering. And then also for those particular challenges that people might be up against. I know you, my understanding is you have some interactivity with people that have challenging sleep schedules, shift workers, etc.

So this can be really, really important. So beginning at the beginning one, why does this work? What is going on? Because there's times I have it like on my head and it's, you know, it's doing like the little stimulator. You can feel it going. And my question is what is happening? What is going on?  Yeah. So, you know, most people, when they think of sleep, they think about the sleep environment, right?

Like how dark is your room? How soft is your pillow? How warm is your covers, et cetera, et cetera.  The reality is sleep is a brain activity.  It's literally a series of patterns in your brain as you transition from your high frequency wake activity, um, through stages that are the stages of sleep that you're probably familiar with that are correspondingly  lower frequencies and more predictable brain activities down to deep sleep, which is The, um, stage of sleep that's considered to be the most restorative and, um, and beneficial to immune health, et cetera.

And so everybody goes through those stages of sleep, but the details of what's going on in your brain during those stages are unique to you, just like your thumbprint.  Yeah. So, um, as you're starting to doze off. You have a characteristic brain rhythm, for example, called alpha, which is just a brain frequency, but your alpha frequency might be 10 hertz, and mine is 9 hertz.

That's a little difference that makes a big difference when you're trying to neuromodulate or stimulate the brain. What SOMNI does,  It has a built in sensor to read brain activity. It detects your individual sleep signature, the unique set of frequencies and patterns that your brain makes that correspond to healthy sleep for you.

And then it uses that 15 minutes of very gentle electrical stimulation to precisely mimic and enhance that sleep signature. So what it's doing is basically taking you when you get into bed over the course of the 15 minute stim session from your wake state to a state of optimal sleep readiness by nudging your brain.

Into that set of patterns that corresponds to, uh, to sleep. And so at the end of the session, like you said, you notice you're feeling more drowsy. Yeah. You're readier for sleep. And also your brain is prepared for a healthy, long, uh, deep night of sleep. So interesting and because I've been talking about this product more recently, especially after having gone had the opportunity to see the lab and what's happening and just the excitement around this product.

So I've spoken with different people and some of the things that come back from my conversations are people saying, Oh, I don't want to have to have something on my head while I sleep. And then I say, Oh, no, it's only 15 minutes before bed. They love hearing that. Then I've had other people say things like, oh, well, I did transcranial magnetic stimulation and this messed me up, or I had problems, or what have you.

What is the distinction between that and what you have created? Yeah, like I said, early on when we were doing our research, we tested all sorts of different stimulation mechanisms, including, you know, TMS, but also like audio stimulation or touch stimulation, et cetera. And what we found is that Electrical stimulation is the most practical and most effective in terms of helping sleep  without any, um, significant effects.

So what it's doing,

if you look at, if you look at actually what's happening in your brain, it's having brain waves that originate in your  prefrontal cortex, which is your forehead, and they just go front to back. Um, while you're sleeping, you have, you know, very oscillatory predictable brain activity that's going through the back.

So we apply a little bit of electrical current. And when I say a little bit, I'm talking about microamps of current. If you've used a, a tense muscle stimulator, like you can get from Best Buy, it's an order of magnitude less current than that. So it's really, really low level,  um, current, but it's just enough to create a small electrical field.

in your prefrontal cortex that initiates this brain activity. So it corresponds basically perfectly to what your brain wants to do naturally when it's asleep.  So interesting. Okay. And for people that have You know, those safety concerns, I know we've already addressed too, that's so kind of a slow level and has been tested.

I saw you had some research on your site speaking to the safety profile of bringing this in, but just kind of re underscoring for people that say, Oh, well, we don't know so much about the brain and just zap in the brain and you know, all these things, how do we further just quell those fears? It's, I mean, I understand it, it's, it sounds a little weird when you first hear about it, right?

It certainly did to me when I first, yeah, so I totally understand, you know, having a little bit of, uh, of hesitation here, but the reality is. The core technology here, this using very low level of electrical stimulation to stimulate your brain transcranially, that's been used for decades to treat depression and to treat other neurological conditions.

There have been over 500 academics. and clinical studies, including FDA studies, and they found no major side effects for this type of treatment. And, you know, I'd just go back to where you started out talking about, um, sleeping pills. Consider the alternative, what people are doing to try to improve their sleep.

This is actually a much more direct and natural way of getting the brain into a state of sleep readiness, it's so much safer than, you know, taking, uh, Ambien or taking NyQuil every night or Benadryl every night or any of the other myriad nasty chemical solutions that people are adopting to try to improve their sleep.

Oh, absolutely. And to reiterate, so you said your findings is four times more effective than melatonin, two times more effective than CBTI, right? And was it 1. 5 more effective than Ambien? Yeah, exactly. That's measuring sleep quality or sleep efficiency. And, um, uh, you know, and again, the big  value relative to Ambien or some of these other.

You know, medications is there's no hangover effect the next day. There's no, um, risk of addiction. There's no other long term, uh, side effects to it. So it's a lot safer. Right. And then for anyone before they start freaking out about the statement about the CBT I, it can be done in tandem with CBT I. It's not what we're saying like, oh, skip the learning and whatever.

It's that we can do it in addition to some of those healthy habits. Absolutely. I, as you know, I'm sure a lot of people don't have access to, um, to CBTI, or they have licenses that don't allow them to adopt a lot of the, the behavioral changes that are, um, you know, recommended in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.

And so, you know, for them, somny can be an alternative, but we've had a lot of customers and actually.  Sleep coaches and CBTI practitioners that have said, Oh, this is really interesting because it could be a great compliment or it could be something that people use for a while as they're preparing for a, you know, a six or eight week course of CBTI.

So we don't see ourselves as really trying to displace any other. Sleep behavior or, um, or sleep aid that any of our customers are using with the exception of some of those sleeping pills that have the side effects and really, you know, don't have, in our opinion, a place in  the sleep aid market.

Absolutely. Oh my gosh. Yeah, we've For anyone listening, we've done a number of episodes on that exact topic, and we have a lot of concerns, and there's even non profits that we've brought on that dedicate their whole mission to educating on some of the deleterious effects of those drugs, so having some of these alternatives is a big deal, and it also just makes me think for the practical application of, you know, I work, I shared with you with a lot of high stakes poker players, and they've got all kinds of variable schedules, they're kind of extreme case, but the ability for them to have something in kind of their back pocket could be really beneficial and then they can stand as an example for other people that might have just more out of the box considerations or variable routines or high stress at certain periods of time that this could help support.

Yeah, totally. You know, one of the things that's nice about it, we have some Olympians that actually are are using the product, uh, Olympic athletes, um, and.  What they say is, you know, they've invested very heavily in sleep. They understand exactly how important it is and how related it is to their performance.

And they spent a ton of money and  a ton of time and effort on optimizing their sleep environment. But then they have to compete halfway around the world, so they have to fly and travel and all of a sudden they can't put their 2, 000 mattress and their whole bed stand into their carry on, but something they can throw in their carry on.

It's really easy to travel with. So it's nice for that. The other, um. A piece of it that we're working on is, you know, I mean, poker players is obviously a cool, very niche market, but reality is there's 19 million Americans that are professionally sleep deprived. Absolutely, uh, you know, either shift work or have, um, uh, schedules a regular

predictable, uh, uh, sleep schedule. And. If you think about the careers that have that, um, sleep challenge, it includes members of the military. It includes pilots and, um, and truck drivers. It includes first responders and, um, uh, E. R. workers. These are not people that you want to be. Sleep deprived, right?

These are people that are in important life or death situations. And yet they're trying to do it  with with insomnia or clinical sleep deprivation. And so, um, we're really excited about, uh, within our company about using SOMNY to improve sleep for those people that have that professional. Um, obligation or career driven, uh, sleep deprivation.

And so we've been working on features that are specifically tuned to night shift workers where they can toggle,  um, the settings in the app to let us know their sleep schedule so that we can then, you know, optimize the stimulation based on the time of day that they're going to sleep versus if they want to take a nap in the middle of the night to prepare them for.

Um, their next shift or things like that. Sure. Okay. So you're sharing about some of those people that have really some absolutely special considerations for their sleep and that this could be supportive. I'm curious for people that just out of pragmatics that sometimes they might say if they miss a dosing or two of somny based on just they get home and they just fall right asleep or whatever happens, is that problematic?

For the effectiveness of something that needs to be something where it's like all the time. What do you see there? Yeah, no, not at all. We have a lot of people. A lot of our customers that use it. Um, uh, you know, somewhat frequently, but not every night. We have a lot of people use.  During the week and then on weekends, they don't just because of, you know, whatever lifestyle they have or the traveling, whatever.

And it's, it's no problem at all.  We, uh, uh, we tune it so that it's always ready to improve your sleep on nights that you use it  on other nights. If you don't use it, it's going to not have. a positive effect, but it won't have a negative effect. Okay, and then is it important in the first period as it's kind of like learning about you to try to have the adherence for the first like three weeks or so?

Is that beneficial or what do you see? Yeah, we recommend for especially for people that are just ramping up in their first to  use it for a few nights in a row and the reasons for that are twofold. One, It is a it's an algorithm. It's a machine learning model. So it takes a few nights to learn your brain patterns and and tune in the personalization so that it can have an effect.

And the, um, the more people use it consecutively at the beginning, the better the model is able to. Uh, to run its personalization routine. The other reason is because it's just a change to your bedtime routine. And for anybody, that takes a little bit of getting used to. And once you get used to it, most people really like having somny as part of their bedtime routine.

It's actually, uh, kind of a nice, pleasant, um, break between daytime and bedtime. But, um, but we want people to... really have that consistent routine and kind of get over the hump initially so that they are prepared for a good night's sleep. Yeah, absolutely. And I was sharing with you that I've been really liking that process has this nice relaxing music and you have this kind of 15 minute intentional wind down.

That's happening and you can also do other things. You're not just like laying there. You can have all that music going. You can have that stimulation. And then I'm often on Kindle or whatever. And it's just like a nice present. Now my husband is like, Oh, we got the music going. Okay. Uh, so it's fun for the whole family.

And then the other couple of things too real quick is, um, because I got to kind of tuck your ear off when I had you for that period of time in your, in your lab, but for people listening, the sometimes some of the biohacker esque people then have concerns about EMFs  and Wi Fi and all those things. Can you share about that piece for any concerns?

Yeah, so it's a connected device. It connects to our cloud because that's where that  algorithm runs, personalize the, um, the stimulation, but we make sure that when it's on your head,  the wifi is turned off. So there is no, you know, wireless EMF. Close to the head. We know that's a concern for some people and we wanted to address that concern by automatically disabling the radio when it's on your on your head.

And then when you put it on the charger, that's when it'll phone home and connect to our cloud.  So great. Okay. And one of the other things we had talked about to that one for people to hear is of the landscape of this market. So this might be a whole new area for people to be hearing about. They might wonder, well, are there a lot of these, like, what is noteworthy about this?

And one of the things I got from you that this does, it doesn't appear that there's anything quite like this on the market. Can you just distinguish that a bit more as to why that's the case? Yeah, the biggest. Way that this is different from any other neurotechnology based headband is that it's it's what's called closed loop.

It's personalized. So there are headbands  that can read brain activity.  But they don't have the stimulation built in. They don't actually then change the state of the brain. And then there's some other products out there that, um, that do brain stimulation, but they're basically one frequency fits all.

They kind of go on and they use a default, uh, frequency for stimulation. That doesn't work for sleep. We actually had our science team, um, try that. We had a we had a broad pilot study where we tested the effects of personalization versus non personalized default simulation. What we saw is that with the non personalized approach.

There's really not a big effect on sleep, two, three minutes in sleep duration, but when it's personalized after just a week of the personalization, we saw anywhere between 20 and 40 minutes of additional sleep duration. So closed loop personalization is something that you only get from Somni.  We have a patent on that technology, but more importantly, we have.

All of the data, all of the years of research that's fed into this algorithm that we've created in order to do the personalization. So there's no one else that can do that.  And it really is what we found to be the key to having a positive effect on sleep. And it makes sense because everybody's brain is different.

Everybody's sleep routine is different. It needs to be personalized in order to Uh, to change and improve your sleep. Yeah, like, I wanted to check that I'm getting this right. One of the things that I've been saying to people is like, so you come home because we, as I'm talking to so many different clients around some of their personalized sleep challenges, they might say, Oh yeah, I'm, I'm good most of the week.

And then I go out with people and I come back home and I'm all just like amped up. And then I don't get to sleep till way later. And it's a whole problem, or they're stressing, or they're shift workers, or there's those extra, they're like just more amplified or the excitatory state in the brain. So I will say about Somni is that part of my understanding is on those nights it can also be beneficial because then it can see that it's kind of deviating from your normal brain activity and then help apply the things to bring you and down regulate you.

Is that accurate? Yeah, very accurate. So I'm a case study by the I'm someone who has a long history of struggling with sleep before, um, uh, before working at STEM science. And it was almost just what you described. It had, you know, general kind of anxiety induced insomnia where my mind would race at night and I would just have trouble kind of shutting off.

And I think that's pretty common. I've talked to a lot of people that have totally experienced that regularly or occasionally. And. Um, and I can tell you that it works. It really does help to suppress the brain activity that corresponds to racing thoughts and to enhance the brain activity that corresponds to feeling drowsy and ready for, um, for sleep.

And so, uh, when I wear my Somni, now I'm,  uh, I'm in a position now that is, I think, Objectively pretty high stress, right? Being  an early stage startup is not exactly like use it to  help these fleas, but I'm sleeping better than ever because I have some knee that can actually help to improve my sleep.

That's the and you got kids and you got the whole that's great. We love hearing that. And, you know, just for any of the listeners too, because I've been sharing, I've been aiming to do less and less product based podcasts often because I, you know, I don't want people to feel like, oh, I got to always buy all these things to.

But this is one that has stood out from the pack for me. And as of right now, I know we're going to set up some sort of promo code for people to, you know, have some sort of thing. But as of right now, as I'm talking, like I actually have no real connection beyond just being able to like have been testing it this more recent week.

So for me, it's just the novelty of one. I have that passion I've shared. about one, my concern when I had my sleep issues, one of the first things that I was given was sleeping pills. And I saw that with my family. And now since then, I've seen that with so many clients that now the downstream effects of some really detours in their life from taking these things.

So it's a huge piece of concern for me. And I'm just for the optimizers that maybe they're not dealing with that they they're sleeping, but they would like to sleep better. So I feel like there's a lot of application here. And one of the things I wanted to touch on too was like Some of the competitors that you're speaking to, some of the price tags on some of these things are quite high, whereas this one I feel like is more accessible to the average person.

Actually, I don't have the price, it's like around 300 or so, right? Something like that? It's 299 for the headband. 299, yeah. We want to, you know, I appreciate you saying that and I'm glad that we can kind of squeeze in on the, you know, the product focus podcast for you. I really,  it is a rare rarity. Yeah.

Cause I really, I have it that so many things we can do to improve our sleep are pretty much free or behavioral nature or. certain strategies and approaches or minimal costs or what have you, but then there are these standout things that can really provide a unique approach for people that are struggling or just would like to up level.

So I think that this appears to be one of them that's noteworthy. That's awesome. And we do, I talk to people every day. Customers that are, you know, like you said, they're motivated because they feel, um, dissatisfied with sleeping pills are addicted to sleeping pills. But I also talked a lot of customers that are, um, are not in that camp and they just want to have something to.

Improve their sleep. Actually, a lot of people that have have bought sleep trackers like, you know, I know you're a ring user like me totally. Um, but they start seeing their report and then what? Right? It's really hard to know what to do to actually, um, close the loop if you see an issue in your sleep report.

And so a lot of our customers will come to us and say, Oh, I need more sleep. Yeah. Yeah. Deep sleep or I'm my ring told me I need more sleep duration or, um, or what have you. And they've either, um, exhausted the behavioral changes that are kind of, you know, 10 tips and tricks that you see everywhere. Yeah.

Or they've, um, tried them and they haven't helped or they can't make those changes in some cases. Yeah. And so, Somni is just ready to help and meet you no matter where you are. Like, if you've got, you know, already have done all of the things that I'm sure you've done around improving your sleep environment, your sleep behaviors, et cetera, it'll still help to further improve your sleep and get you that last little, um, bit of optimal.

Sleep. But if you're like the, you know, majority of people that has more room for improvement for whatever reason, then you can start using sound me and make changes and improvements to your sleep behaviors and routine in parallel, and it will help to accelerate all of that. So it's really been just so rewarding  and how we've been changing their lives and how we've been improving not just their sleep, but their ability to.

Um, adopt lifestyle changes, uh, during their day around better exercise, better decision making, better relationships with family, better performance at work, et cetera, et cetera. So awesome. Uh, okay. So given that you have now, now you're getting this great sleep and you've now devoted your life to really diving into this topic, and you've been in this for now a bunch of years, people are likely to want to know the answers to these four questions that we ask everyone that comes on how they're managing their own.

sleep. So, looking forward to hearing what that looks like for you. So, every guest that we have come on, they answer these. And the first one is always, what does your nightly sleep routine look like? Right now, I'm assuming there's probably, I'm assuming I know one part of it, but you can let us know. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So, I, of course, use my Somni every night. And so, my Routine is, uh, you know, after I kind of brush my teeth and ready for bed, I'll, I'll climb into bed. I'll put on my, uh, my Somni and hit the button in the app for the 15 minute personalized them session. And then I'll, I'll read a book on my Kindle for the 15 minutes.

And, you know, as you indicated during that. Um, that STEM session, the app plays some chill spa music. It feels like a little mini vacation. And then I'll just be kind of enjoying and reading my book. And at the end of the 15 minutes, I'm usually still awake. Some nights I'll fall asleep during the STEM session, but most nights.

I'll, um, I'll just, you know, hear the music stop and, and feel the end of the STEM session and I'll take off my headband and put it on the charger on my bed stand and close my book and just go to sleep. So great. Okay. Simple, easy, and unique for those who are just learning about Somni, you know, now in this, in this conversation.

So that's awesome. And then. Our second question would be what is your morning quote unquote sleep routine look like with the argument that how we start our day can impact our sleep results? Yeah, so I've got a couple of kids so they tend to dominate the morning, you know, so  my morning routine is I'll, I'll get up and every morning I'll try to Hang out with the kids while they're getting ready for school and having their breakfast.

I'll make them a lunch in a lot of cases and  help to get them out the door. My wife is the one who does the drop offs in the morning and then once the kids are out the door. I, uh, make myself a double espresso and I will, um, sit and on most mornings, I'm, I'm lucky to be able to have my coffee and just read the news and sort of, um, ease into the day before my first meeting of the day.

Amazing. Okay, so you can have your double espresso and still sleep well at night. Love it.  Yes, I'm a big promoter of caffeine, by the way, so people don't have to feel like you have to get rid of all fun and joy in life to sleep well. I mean, I would say across the board, you know, like you and I have  Um,  so many of the, uh, the, so much of the sleep advice you hear out there is it just sounds like homework, you know, like you hear, you know, don't have coffee, don't have a glass of wine with dinner, you know, finish eating at 5 p.

m. or all of these things and it's all, you know, based on real science and there's a rationale for it, but, you Most people are never going to do that, myself included. So I, um, uh, I feel great about using SOMNI. It helps me to sleep well enough that I don't feel the need to, you know, constrain my lifestyle around.

sleep. I'll still enjoy a coffee in the afternoon or, you know, occasionally have a glass of wine with dinner and, um, uh, and still be able to sleep well. Yes. Love that. And then our next question would be, what might we see visually in your space on your nightstand or beyond? And also if you travel or whatever, you know, just anything that we might.

Wanna be aware of that, we would see. Yeah. So I've got, um, my, my insomnia with the charger. Uh, it sits on the nightstand. There's a,  a nice, um, charging cradle that the, the headband just drops into magnetically, so it's really easy to  charge. As an aside, one of the things that we learned when we were early in the process of developing and, um, creating the somnia headband is that.

Most people would rather experience physical pain than have another damn thing to plug in every day. Yes.  That's what led us to having this really easy magnetic charger. You just drop it in and you don't have to plug anything in. Anyhow, my bed stand's got my Somni charger. It has my My Kindle  and then just a, um, uh, night lamp and a, um, I use a,  uh, nest, um, with the screen for an alarm clock that, um, wakes me up in the morning and, you know, tells me the weather and stuff.

Awesome. No, that was actually, I think I was mentioning that to you before we hit record because that was one of the things I was concerned about because I have used some of these head based products in the past. And so. some of them would have like connectivity issues and all these things are just like a lot of steps.

And it's one of those things where hopefully we've done the work to set up a lifestyle where when sleep time comes that your sleep pressure is mounting and you kind of just don't want to deal with some of these things around those times. And that was one of the things I was happy about with the Somni was just really my experience has been.

the ease of being able to set those up without a lot of, I don't know, struggles. And I think that's important. Yeah, we worked with a really great team of designers that was very thoughtful about how's this gonna, how's this gonna fit into your life and be easy to use. And also, by the way, hopefully, you know, you would agree to make something that doesn't look like A neurotechnology.

It kind of looks, you know, uh, it looks like hopefully a piece of sleepwear that you are in her forehead rather than a, um, you know, a gadget that you have to put on. Totally. Yeah. The silk and the whole thing. Yeah. It's totally seamless and easy. So I'm excited about that. And also I haven't. Yet traveled with it, but to your point and since I do travel a lot I do like that.

It doesn't have a ton of like Accoutrements or all kinds of heavy big things that could be problematic to throwing into My luggage or what have you and actually originally when it first had come I was thinking of oh This will be like an at home thing that i'll use but now that i've been doing it I do foresee that I likely will very much take it and that could actually as we've been talking about Be even more important because oftentimes our sleep does tend to tank when we're on the road.

So that could be awesome.  So it's totally yes, so good. Okay, and uh to the point on all those factors around sleep one of our last questions is one where it kind of takes all the things you've learned and it's What would you say so far has made the biggest change to your sleep game or said another way?

Maybe biggest aha moment in managing your own sleep Yeah, well, look, I mean, I, I don't want to turn it into a, uh, Somni commercial  listeners can, you know, go to our website, try somni. com available to ship that, but the things outside of Somni that. Have really been game changers for me from a  sleep point of view.

One is the, the kind of repeatable sleep routine. I really do try to be, you know, very disciplined about, um, just following my. My plan every night and I recommend that to everybody the other change that I I made relatively recently that has made a big difference is like I said, I I read every night. Yeah, but I found that Um  certain types of books I was sleeping better than others and I started like really kind of like  For a while I was like keeping track and trying to create my little like, you know, Pandora of what books help me to sleep and what don't.

And what I found is that, um, reading sort of like, like popular science and just non fiction kind of books that  are, you know, a little bit boring, uh, really help me sleep because I never mind putting them down. But if I switch to something that's really character driven, then every once in a while I'll be, um, not disciplined enough and I'll just keep reading.

Yeah, of course. Yeah.  So, so I started. Like.  think about my reading list as, you know, like I'll keep track of books for bedtime versus books for, you know, for the beach or for personal reading pleasure. And that's actually helped a lot. Oh my God, that's so great. Because one of the things that we do with our programs are what we put under the framework of circadian rhythm and treatment.

And one of the kind of modules that we bring in is. Uh, thought timing and then the timing of the type of thoughts and that we're trying to have them be diurnal in nature So that we have like our day mode things and our night mode things You know training ourselves to be disciplined in the types of thoughts that we're engaging in And so by virtue of the things that we're taking in and or then the paths of thoughts that we're going down and so that's so great that you're really Looking at that and sculpting that to, you know, get the results that you want to have.

That's amazing. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And the way you put it is perfect. I really do find that, you know,  I'm the type of person that, um, I really get, I love reading and the books really get sort of, you know, like,  In fact, my brain and I think about a lot and so if it's something that I'm not,  you know, to personally invested in, then we will sleep a lot better.

And if it's something that, you know, like I said, if it's something where I just am invested in the story, I can't wait to find out what happens then. That's not a good book for me at nighttime. It's better. Totally. I know because that could seem counterintuitive. It's like, oh, well, it's an exciting thing.

It's a happy thing. Like, not a problem. But then we see that you stress like EU stress still being maybe the opposite of what we'd like to be cultivating at just that time frame of the night. So that's really great. And lastly,  so and you know, again, we were talking about How our aim is for largely, we're doing a lot less product, you know, podcasts, and yet this one has stood out.

So I would assume that people listening might say, Oh my gosh, okay, I want to look at this. I want to test this for myself, or maybe, you know, my husband is a shift worker or whatever the application is. So in that case, you know, one of the things that we think is really important is to then have some of those options to your point of instead of going down the path of the pharmaceuticals or over the counter sleep aids or beyond, then to have other things that they can do.

So how can they test out Somni or follow the work you're doing? Yeah, that's awesome. Anyone can go and order somny from our website. It's try somny, t r y s o m n e e. com and everyone gets a 30 night sleep well guarantee. You can try it for 30 days. If for whatever reason, you know, it doesn't fit in your routine, you don't feel like it's helping, you don't like the way it looks, whatever it is, you just send it back to us, we'll even pay for return shipping.

So no risk to, um, to giving it a shot. Um, and then they can also learn more about. Uh, about the science behind SOMNY on our website, we have pages dedicated to our research and to learn about the team behind the product as well as hear from customers and hear some of the great stories that, um, uh, that members of what we call the one hour club, uh, said about the product, those are customers that tell us that they've SOMNY.

com. Uh, added an hour or more to their sleep duration. Yes. The one hour club. Yeah. I love when you were speaking about that. I've shared that with some other people too, because some people, you know, when I first started talking about it, they're like, Oh, well, I don't have problems falling asleep or anything.

So it's not for me. But then you're like, well, it's the sleep onset piece, sleep duration, sleep efficiency. It kind of hits at just about every component of what we'd like to see for improving sleep. So. Really cool that that component. So what I want to say is I want to thank you so much for one, taking the time to on the, from a personal note of bringing me around to your sleep lab and introducing me to your whole team.

It was just incredible. And then giving the opportunity to test this out because, you know, I really, it was, I had come back from traveling. And I had the stack of things that had come in to test for sleep. And yet yours was like the one that I was most excited about. So I genuinely am excited to continue on with this.

I've already had great results so far in the short time I've been using it. So I'm looking forward to more too. And yeah, just really appreciate you taking the time and sharing what you've been discovering that could help people. Thanks so much for saying that and for having me on Molly. It's been a real pleasure to spend time with you.

And, you know, our mission is to end sleep deprivation and you're doing a great job of helping all of your listeners, um, to, uh, improve their sleep as well. So congratulations on all your success. And, um, to  partner with you going forward. We're more than happy to. Awesome. Oh, well, thank you so much. Such aligned missions.

So here's to helping people sleep better. And thanks so much again.  You've been listening to the sleep as a skill podcast, the top podcast for people who want to take their sleep skills to the next level. Every Monday, I send out the sleep obsessions newsletter, which aims to be one of the most obsessive newsletters on the planet.

Fun fact, I've never missed a Monday for over five years and counting. And it contains everything that you need to know in the fascinating world of sleep. Head on over to sleepisaskill. com forward slash newsletter to sign up.