My Dreem Experience - Week 11

So I have now been using the Dreem Headset for 11 weeks and this is the final report on my trial with the Dreem Headset.

For those who are unaware and have not read previous posts, the Dreem headset is a sleep aid. It plays soothing sounds to get you off to sleep (or alterntively meditation or sounds for synchronising your breething to encourage sleep). It also monitors your brainwaves, pulse, position changes and duration of sleep and whilst you are in "Deep Sleep" will play sounds to improve the quality of our deep sleep. This is all supported by machine learning and the software is regularly updated to optimise performance. Finally, it uses gentle sounds to wake you up around an alrm time setting that you have decided upon.

So what have I learnt and found out, and what is my experience.

Well I suppose the big positive is that I feel less tired. I hardly ever feel like I need a mid day nap to recharge and the bags and dark shadows under my eyes are significantly reduced. I don't feel that I struggle so much to go to sleep and generally feel a lot more positive about it.

The feedback about my sleep stats also makes me more aware and probably a little more positive about going to bed at sensible times.

That is the subjective and qualitative experience.

In terms of Statistics and hard numbers, It appears that I sleep about the same amount as the average Dreem user at an average of 6 hours 21 minutes cf. 6 hrs. 33 min. for the average user. I change position a few less times than the average user, which surprises me as I always thought that I was a restless sleeper. I do however take roughly twice as much time to go to sleep than the average user, averaging 40 minutes per night. This difference appears to account for the fact that I go to sleep roughly 20 minutes later than the average user.

The single thing which has struck me the most is how little time I actually spend in deep sleep. It tends to average between 20 and 40 minutes a night. I had always thought that a person spends most of the night in deep sleep and that light sleep and REM occured only whilst going to sleep and beginning to wake. However the metrics show that, for me at least, deep sleep appears to happen quite randomly through the night without any discernable pattern.

I also plotted the statistics for the last 11 weeks and interestingly, whilst the trend shows an almost doubling in the improvement of my deep sleep quality over this period of time, the amount of time that I spend in deep sleep has dropped slightly. The overall period of time that I sleep each night has not changed significantly.

So my conclusion? It does work, not dramatically, but enough to improve my life and to notice the difference. For me at least, it has been a worthwhile investment.