Contributed by Eight Sleep Clinical Team

The Eight Sleep Pod is a temperature-enabled sleep tracker. Throughout the night, the Pod makes real-time temperature adjustments (warming or cooling) based on you and your sleep. Tracking sleep is a valuable first step to understanding your current sleep and making changes to improve it. But tracking alone can only get you so far. The Pod goes further. 

We analyzed data from 216 new Eight Sleep members, divided into two groups: those who already tracked their sleep, and those who didn’t. This let us test whether the Pod improved sleep for both groups, and how long those improvements lasted.

Key takeaways

• Those new to sleep tracking had, on average, an 86% improvement in subjective sleep quality after one month of using the Pod, compared to a 31% on average improvement for those already using a sleep tracker.
• After six months of sleeping on the Pod, both groups had similar average reported sleep quality improvement rates: 25% for those new to sleep tracking & 27% for those familiar with sleep tracking.
• Sleep trackers alone provide data that can be used to drive healthy behavior changes (source). The Eight Sleep Pod provides sleep tracking data and adds automatic, overnight temperature to maintain sleep quality improvements over time.

What the Pod does that sleep trackers don’t: act on the data

Most sleep trackers are wearable devices that go on your wrist or fingers. They can report sleep quality, but ultimately leave you with the decision of what to do with that information (source). Most sleep trackers only monitor your sleep and hope the data alone prompts you to change your behavior. This can backfire: seeing a poor sleep report every morning, with no way to act on it, can reinforce beliefs about sleep that actually make it worse (source). One study shows that 76% of Americans have lost sleep worrying about their sleep problems, a pattern known as sleep anxiety or orthosomnia (source). 

The Eight Sleep Pod is different: it tracks your sleep while also actively regulating your thermal sleep environment. Most people know the feeling of waking up too hot or tossing and turning. Often, this is because the bed disrupts the core body temperature drop required for sleep onset and maintenance, and it’s something sleep tracking alone can’t fix (source, source). After just one week, 71% of participants reported a decrease in the bed being too hot when falling asleep. Importantly, the Pod continues regulating temperature throughout the night.

The real comparison isn’t tracking versus not tracking. It’s how the Pod uses the sleep data to update your thermal environment every night while you sleep.

The novelty effect of sleep tracking

How do we know that sleep quality improvements reported on the Pod are actually a result of the temperature regulation and not just the excitement of trying something new? A brand-new device tends to feel more impactful at first no matter what it does. Research shows that this excitement, known as the novelty effect, usually lasts for three months (source). To test this, we compared members who’d never tracked their sleep before to those who already had. New Eight Sleep members who had never used a sleep tracker before the Pod reported an 86% improvement in sleep quality, on average, after one month of sleeping on the Pod. New Eight Sleep members who were already using a sleep tracker when they started sleeping on the Pod reported a 31% improvement in subjective sleep quality, on average, over the same time period (see Figure). 

Figure: Sleep quality improvement (%), by sleep tracking history. Bars show the reported sleep quality improvement at one month and six months after beginning to sleep on the Pod. Colors indicate sleep tracking history: “New to sleep tracking” (blue) or “Previously sleep tracking” (orange).

The large difference in sleep quality improvement between timepoints (one and six months) among those new to sleep tracking highlights the novelty effect. Those new to using a sleep tracker benefitted from heightened engagement and the motivation to act on their sleep data for the first time, while existing sleep tracker users are already used to the data. The smaller initial sleep quality improvement among those with sleep tracking history shows that there is less room for habit-driven sleep quality improvements among this group, since their first sleep tracker had already gotten them partway there. The improvement that remains is coming from the Pod’s ability to actively adjust the thermal sleep environment. 

What happens to the novelty effect after six months? 

Six months after beginning to sleep on the Pod, the novelty effect of sleep tracking faded for both groups. This indicates that the Pod’s temperature regulation, not habit change, is driving the sleep quality improvements that continued to be reported. After six months on the Pod, subjective sleep quality improved by 25% for those new to sleep tracking and 27% for those with a tracking history. If the sleep quality improvements reported with Pod use were driven exclusively by novelty, new habits, or the psychological effects of tracking, those improvements would have faded after three months as the novelty wore off. So after six months of Pod use, when the novelty has worn off for everyone, the lasting sleep quality improvements can be attributed to the Pod’s overnight temperature regulation. This is the difference between the Pod and other sleep trackers.

The novelty effect of sleep tracking is real, but our data shows it is not what drives sustained improvement. The Pod’s combination of sleep tracking and active overnight temperature regulation is what delivered sustained sleep quality improvements, regardless of prior tracking history. Most studies of sleep trackers assess how accurately a device measures sleep, not whether it improves it (source, source). And the few that do measure sleep outcomes often only track them for a week or two (source). Our study followed members for six months, and the sleep quality improvements held.

For people looking to move beyond just tracking sleep, the Pod offers something more direct: not just more data and trying to break old habits, but a device that acts on your biology every night. Explore the science at eightsleep.com/science.

Appendix 

The broader behavioral and perceptual findings referenced here are drawn from a longitudinal study of 254 Eight Sleep members across five timepoints using seven validated clinical surveys. All findings reported were statistically significant at the Bonferroni-corrected alpha level of 0.025, using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. 

The sleep tracker subgroup analysis included 216 Eight Sleep members, 47 who had never used a sleep tracker and 169 who were already using one when they began to use the Pod. Clinically meaningful improvement was defined as a reduction of three or more points on the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index from baseline (source).