Sleepmaxxing: What Is It And Does It Actually Work?

I’m one of those people who is obsessed with sleep. Ask me how I am, and I’ll reply with how many hours of sleep I got last night, which should answer your question. If I managed to get eight and a half hours? I will feel really smug about that all day and probably segue it into a conversation at least once. I’ve booked myself into hotels specifically designed for sleep as a “little treat” and have weirdly strong opinions about mattresses and duvet sets. Considering all of the above, I should love TikTok’s latest wellness obsession, sleepmaxxing. But—and putting aside its odd, incel-adjacent moniker, because apparently we’re just slapping “maxxing” onto everything now—I remain broadly unconvinced.

Sleepmaxxing, which currently has around 98.6 million posts on TikTok, is an umbrella term to describe any sort of “hack” for maximizing or improving your sleep. Magnesium supplements. Mainlining kiwis. Taping your mouth shut. No liquids two hours before bed. Sleeping in a really cold room. Something called “pineal gland meditation”. You get the idea. Predictably, a lot of sleepmaxxing content online is less focussed on feeling good, and more focused on looking good (“looksmaxxing”). And there are a lot of young men leading the charge within this sphere (“Better sleep = sharper face and physique,” writes one user). Even so, it’s a new term for a much older preoccupation, which is: the obsession with getting enough sleep and prioritising it over all other things, like going out or having fun.

This is not my first rodeo. When the iPhone introduced its first integrated sleep-tracking app back in 2020, I remember becoming hypnotized by it. On the nights that I only managed six hours, I felt awful, as though I’d failed at some vital test and was now doomed. This was only compounded by being able to see the lack of sleep in front of me, in numbers. It didn’t help that I was constantly being bombarded with the message that sleep is the most important thing in life. A lack of sleep can elevate a person’s risk for dementia, heart disease, and diabetes, among a slew of other health conditions. Getting less than six hours a night can shorten a person’s life span. Sleep, I was told, from every single angle, is literally a matter of life and death. And it’s backed up by science. Go to sleep, my brain would scream at me every night. Go to sleep now!!!

Obviously, if there’s one thing that’s always going to negatively impact your sleep cycle, it’s anxiety. Multiple studies have found that sleep problems are much more common among individuals with anxiety disorders. Sleep disturbances can also cause heightened anxiety, which creates a nice little feedback loop that starts with a sleep-tracking app and ends with looking like that meme of DW from Arthur with tired eyes. The actual act of becoming obsessed with sleep was, I realized, negatively impacting my sleep. All those measures I’d put in place to maximize my sleep (no screen time before bed, lights off by 11 pm, melatonin every night, tracking my REM hours digitally) had created an environment in which sleep was no longer a pleasant and necessary thing, but rather an extremely tense exercise that I had to engage in nightly.