Zen Sleep Puts a Sleep Specialist in Your Pocket

Founder Sunny Liang used his struggle with insomnia as a catalyst to bring clinically-validated sleep therapy to the masses.

StartUp Health
StartUp Health

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The Challenge

Sleep. It is as necessary as a good diet and exercise to our health, yet much less likely to end up on the cover of a fitness magazine. On the one hand, most of us know the bliss of a good night’s sleep and its power to improve mood and energy. On the other hand, it’s easy to treat getting enough sleep as a luxury — nice but not necessary, especially if a deadline at work is looming or there’s a Netflix show to catch up on.

Here’s the rub (and it’s not what dreams may come): too little sleep is linked to several chronic diseases and conditions, like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and depression and other mood disorders. Lack of sleep also contributes to car and work-related accidents. Overly tired employees are 70% more likely to be involved in workplace accidents and drivers who get less than six hours of sleep a night are 33% more likely to be involved in a car accident.

When you start taking these health and safety implications seriously, it becomes clear that encouraging healthy sleep ought to be a priority for a workplace, a community, and a society. There’s more on the line than just dragging a little at work or feeling run down, especially when you take into account that up to one out of three adults suffer from chronic insomnia, a number that has grown since the onset of the pandemic.

But knowing you need help with sleep and getting that help are two different things. While 70 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders, there is a scarcity of sleep doctors and specialists to meet that need. Patients, desperate for help, end up going to their GP and getting prescribed sleeping pills that are hard to quit and have long-term negative health implications. Or, taking matters into their own hands, people try melatonin, alcohol, Benadryl, or whatever will help them turn off at night. Sleep, however, is like sand. The harder you try to grasp it, the more it slips through your fingers.

Origin Story

Sunny Liang knows what it’s like to grapple with sleep. A lifelong insomniac, he can remember walking into his parents’ room at three in the morning to tell them he couldn’t sleep as young as third grade. Over the years, his insomnia came and went, triggered by life changes, environments, and different stressors. Then he started his career on Wall Street as a private equity investor.

“It might just be the worst profession for an insomniac. I was on call 24/7. When I tried to sleep, it became a psychological snowball — you’re so anxious about getting sleep you can’t get sleep.”

Eventually, Liang saw a sleep doctor (he now knows he’s one of the lucky few with access to one). It was at that 2018 appointment that he encountered CBT-I, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. CBT-I examines what behaviors, thoughts, and feelings might be contributing to insomnia and helps people restructure their actions and attitudes for better sleep. It’s a combination of sleep hygiene tools — like cutting off caffeine by a certain time a day — and tools to reduce anxious thoughts about sleep itself.

For the first time, Liang understood what he could change in his life to help with his insomnia. Putting it into practice proved more difficult. He left the appointment with a 40-point checklist and resorted to Post-it notes around his desk and apartment to remind him to do things like stop looking at screens by a certain time or make sure he got some fresh air and sunshine. It took time, but his insomnia got better. Understanding how sleep worked and the fundamentals about what created better sleep did what no amount of melatonin could.

Perhaps all those good nights of sleep helped Liang dream up the idea to bring CBT-I tools and interventions to the millions of people struggling with sleep like he did. His Post-it note experience certainly helped him understand the very human struggles in doing CBT-I, specifically keeping track of the behavioral interventions that promote good sleep. What people needed, he thought, was a sleep coach in their pocket, something that took into account their unique lives, schedules, and sleep challenges and provided customized support.

Under the Hood

Zen Sleep is a comprehensive sleep coaching platform that leads users towards better sleep using personalized routines and interventions based on the principles of CBT-I. It helps its users build better sleepy hygiene habits — the behavioral side — while addressing the cognitive challenges to good sleep like stress and anxiety through guided meditations and access to a real-life sleep coach. Along the way, Zen Sleep incorporates data from a user’s wearable devices to track progress and changes, leveraging the data to guide next steps.

“We’re not here to compete with wearables, but to partner with them and provide wisdom and an actionable plan for the user based on their numbers from these devices,” explains Liang.

The process starts with a detailed questionnaire — developed with Zen Sleep co-founder and board-certified sleep physician Neil Klein, MD — that zeroes in on choices, practices, and attitudes that impact sleep. The app then integrates seamlessly with the user’s wearable device, if available, to do a deep dive into its metrics to create a suggested daily routine. Backed by its proprietary AI, Zen Sleep creates an automated reminder and suggestion system, available 24/7 to support better sleep habits and hygiene. Additional coaching and help comes by connecting to a sleep coach, who can access a patient’s data from the app to provide next-level insight based on real numbers.

It’s a thoughtfully tiered solution that uses technology to help people disengage from technology for better sleep. For Liang, it’s been most gratifying to see customers who had given up hope for better sleep see improvements. He describes one user case, a middle-aged woman who was the third generation in her family to rely on sleeping pills. She worried about the long-term effects, but after ten years of use, the pills seemed like a permanent part of her life. She became a beta tester for Zen Sleep and has slowly decreased her Ambien use. For the first time in a long time, she has hope.

In the year ahead, Zen Sleep looks to partner with large employers and insurers who want to incentivize sleep for employees. Businesses are starting to wake up to the fact that rested employees are healthier, more productive, and less likely to call out of work. In fact, it’s estimated that employers in the United States lose $3000 per employee in absenteeism due to sleep issues, contributing to the estimated $400B in GDP lost because of poor sleep.

“It used to be that insurers didn’t pay any attention to sleep but that’s starting to change. They ask if you smoke or drink but not about your sleep, and it’s connected to so many health outcomes.”

Why We’re Proud to Invest

StartUp Health proudly backs Zen Sleep’s innovative CBT-I delivery system that offers drug-free relief to millions of people suffering from sleep disorders. Better sleep without the use of sedatives is not only a dream come true to those patients but offers long-term health benefits and savings costs. Despite the growing pile of evidence on the importance of sleep for health, it’s a relatively untapped market, positioning Zen Sleep well as a potential leader in the sleep tech market.

Not only are they poised to lead the way in sleep coaching technology, Liang and his team’s partnership mentality sets them apart from other sleep products. They aren’t competing with wearables or other tracking devices — they’re providing the wisdom around those metrics for their users. It’s one thing to know your sleep trends; it’s a very different thing to know how to change them for the better and be held accountable to do so.

Changing your behavior is hard. Zen Sleep knows this and created a user experience that goes deep to establish new routines, new patterns, and new ways of thinking about sleep. The individualized plans for each user take into account their real-life schedule and challenges, and the original content, CBT-I lessons, and community help change ingrained thoughts and anxieties around sleep.

Join us in welcoming Zen Sleep to the StartUp Health family! We can’t wait to see what’s in store for them in 2023.

Watch Sunny Liang’s StartUp Health TV Studio interview

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