Sleep: Jeff Kahn of Rise Science On Why You Should Make Getting A Good Night’s Sleep A Major Priority In Your Life, And How You Can Make That Happen

Be strategic about light: light is the most powerful circadian “cue” there is. Get natural sunlight as soon after waking as possible to reset your circadian rhythm and guard against blue light in the evening before bed so that your body can wind down naturally for sleep. Circadian alignment is fairly critical to meeting your sleep need.

Getting a good night’s sleep has so many physical, emotional, and mental benefits. Yet with all of the distractions that demand our attention, going to sleep on time and getting enough rest has become extremely elusive to many of us. Why is sleep so important and how can we make it a priority?

In this interview series called “Sleep: Why You Should Make Getting A Good Night’s Sleep A Major Priority In Your Life, And How You Can Make That Happen” we are talking to medical and wellness professionals, sleep specialists, and business leaders who sell sleep accessories to share insights from their knowledge and experience about how to make getting a good night’s sleep a priority in your life.

As part of this interview series, we had the pleasure to interview Jeff Kahn, CEO and Co-Founder of Rise Science.

Jeff Kahn is the Co-Founder and CEO at Rise Science, the leader in sleep and energy management. Jeff and his Rise Science co-founder Leon Sasson were the first to publish research on technology-enabled sleep behavior modification over a decade ago, and have recently completed the largest known study on sleep and real-world job performance across the NFL and sales teams. Jeff’s research and work have been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, NBC, CBS, Fox Sports, and ESPN.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to ‘get to know you’. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your backstory?

Of course. When I was an undergrad at Northwestern I was struggling with exhaustion, as many in college do, and I suspected sleep played a role. I didn’t know what it was about sleep (or lack thereof) exactly that was impacting my productivity and mood — was it about how much time I was spending in a particular stage of sleep? Or how much I was sleeping? Or something I might not even know about? To get to the bottom of it I added some independent studies in sleep to my engineering curriculum and discovered this now 40-year old, canonical sleep science framework-The Two Process Model of Sleep Regulation — that posits sleep debt and circadian rhythm play the greatest role in how we all feel and function on any given day. Sleep debt is a running total of the hours of sleep you’ve missed over the past 14 days, as compared to the amount of sleep your body genetically/uniquely needed, and the circadian rhythm is your body’s natural internal clock that dictates the best times for you to wake and go to bed, among all other important processes in the body. This discovery and my subsequent study of the field changed my view on the importance of sleep and specifically the importance of meeting your unique sleep need every night and continues to motivate me to find a way to help others take control of their sleep and energy levels.

Fast forward a year, and my now co-founder Leon Sasson and I had published first of its kind research on how technology can change sleep behavior. The study caught the attention of the Northwestern football team who invited us to work with the team to improve their sleep and therefore their performance on the field. From there, word spread, and we were soon working with professional and collegiate sports teams across the NFL, MLB, NBA, MLS, and NCAAF. A year or two later we introduced RISE to employees of Fortune 500 companies, to explore the impact of sleep on sales performance. We found that sales teams using RISE to sleep more and manage their day around their circadian rhythm increased their outbound efforts by 50% and their sales revenue by 14%, with 95% of users claiming to feel more productive. With the conviction that RISE could help anyone with a smartphone make the most of their day, we launched to the public in the summer of 2020 and have surpassed 1M downloads to date.

Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this particular career path?

As I mentioned, I initially wanted to figure out a way to feel better so I could perform my best in college. I was an engineering student with a hectic schedule and heavy workload which left me little time to sleep and greatly impacted my mood and productivity. Once I decided sleep had something to do with it I begged my school’s sleep science department to take me on as an apprentice and it was there that I discovered exactly what I needed to do to feel better and published my first paper on the tie between technological intervention for better sleep for better energy. It wasn’t any of the things I originally assumed, such as needing a new mattress, or more REM sleep, or even sleep quality but instead reduced sleep debt and a schedule that aligns with my natural circadian rhythm. So knowing when you’re tired, when you’re active, when you’re feeling good, when you’re feeling down, when you’re feeling productive; all of those things will largely come down to those two things. Learning that made me realize that being able to impact the energy of people is something that the world needs and doing that will be the most important contribution that I could make in a lifetime. It was some of my initial research that led me to working with sports teams and later being able to help anyone with a mobile phone.

Can you share with our readers a bit about why you are an authority in the sleep and wellness fields? In your opinion, what is your unique contribution to the world of wellness?

Thanks to my previous research and time spent studying under sleep experts at Northwestern, I am able to bring a unique and science-backed approach to energy management that no other solution is today. The initial work with sports teams at Northwestern and later professional athletes throughout NFL, MLB, NBA, MLS, and NCAAF has proven the benefits of using the two laws of sleep to improve how you feel and function throughout the day. Teams such as Chicago Bulls, Miami Dolphins, and New England Patriots etc. have all benefited from this research and subsequent product resulting in a 70% decrease in injury and 10% increase in better playmaking.

In addition to being named in Forbes 30 under 30 for my work with RISE, my research has been featured in top publications such as The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, NBC, CBS etc. RISE has since completed funding rounds that resulted in $15.5 million in funds. Additionally, RISE was one of the fastest growing consumer apps upon its release in 2020, with over 1M downloads so far. 80% of our users report feeling better within just five days of using the app. With so many sleep products and trackers on the market, I certainly feel that the science-based approach we take at RISE has been and continues to make a real difference in the well being of our customers.

Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

One of the most important books I’ve read is the Oxford Handbook of Sleep and Sleep Disorders. It’s the technical tome on all things sleep. It’s a heavy book, 5 pounds or so and hundreds of pages. I had two major takeaways from reading it for the first time.

First, everyone thinks sleep is part of being healthy along with exercise, nutrition and mental health. What the oxford handbook taught me is that sleep is the foundation for all human functioning: mental, physical, emotional. There’s nothing more high impact than getting your sleep right. And while there’s certainly a lot to learn about sleep, the field has discovered a lot of knowledge since it started in 1925 at UChicago.

The second lesson is that you can learn a lot about any field by reading the top 3–5 books in that area. You won’t be an expert, but you’ll begin to see what is known and what isn’t known. But to make an impact on people’s lives, you’ve to get out of the lab and start building things for people to use and interact with. That’s when the real learning starts.

Do you have a favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life or your work?

Cliche but putting your own oxygen mask on first before you can help those around you. I feel that is essentially what I was able to do with my own sleep and energy journey and now I’m able to help others via RISE.

Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. Let’s start with the basics. How much sleep should an adult get? Is there a difference between people who are young, middle-aged, or elderly?

Unlike most sleep advice on the internet, I can’t actually tell you how much sleep you need! That’s because an individual’s sleep “need” is a genetic trait, just like your height or eye color. It’s true that on average we need about 8 hours (8 hours and 10 minutes, give or take 44 minutes, to be exact), but 13% of us need 9 hours or more! (And some of us — a truly infinitesimal percent of the population — are actually fine with just 5 or 6 hours. It’s best to assume that’s not you!)

The easiest way to find out your sleep need is to use our RISE app. We’ll take the last 365 nights of sleep data already stored on your phone to calculate your individual sleep need in hours and minutes. If you don’t use RISE, the best way to find out your sleep need outside of a sleep lab is to go on vacation and not use an alarm for several days. See how much you sleep on the very last day — that’s likely to be your biological sleep need (on all previous days you are likely to be “out-sleeping” your sleep need to make up for lost sleep).

It is also true that our individual sleep need changes over the course of our lifetime. Newborns, of course, require the most sleep. They’re asleep for most of the day to allow for vital growth and development. Sleep need, on average, then generally drops from that point onward, but the timing of when you’re primed to sleep (your circadian rhythm) shifts too. When your teenager starts going to bed later and wanting to wake later, they aren’t just rebelling — that’s their biological clock naturally shifting during that developmental phase (it’ll then shift back when they’re young adults).

What’s most important to take away from all this is that even though your sleep need will shift over your lifetime, it will do so in a way that is unique to you. Knowing how much sleep you biologically need, and then making sure you get that amount as consistently as possible each night is essential to feeling and functioning your best.

Is the amount of hours the main criteria, or the time that you go to bed? For example, if there was a hypothetical choice between getting to bed at 10PM and getting up at 4AM, for a total of 6 hours, or going to bed at 2AM and getting up at 10AM for a total of 8 hours, is one a better choice for your health? Can you explain?

Meeting your individual sleep need (getting the number of hours that you uniquely need) is the first thing that matters to feeling and functioning your best but there is absolutely a catch.

As discussed in earlier answers, sleep is governed by two processes: sleep homeostasis (your body’s natural drive to sleep) and your circadian rhythm (your internal body clock). They are independent processes but work together to get you the sleep you need to in turn feel and function well while awake. Which is to say, you are most likely to get the amount of natural, healthy sleep you need if you go to bed when your drive for sleep and your circadian trough align.

There are then a couple things to note as it relates to your example. First, everyone has a sleep chronotype, 10pm might be when some people are biologically inclined to sleep (their natural circadian trough) while for others it might in fact be 2am (an extreme night owl). If you are an extreme night owl, going to bed at 2am and waking at 10am — if your sleep need is 8 hours — is the best option for your health.

However, if your regular bedtime is 10pm, but instead you’re out partying and go to bed at 2am, for simplicity’s sake, our bias would be to tell you still try to meet your sleep need (waking at 10am on an 8 hour need) but there’s actually a very good chance you won’t be able to get up at 10am as you describe. It’s much more likely you’ll instead wake at your usual waketime (maybe 6am on an 8 hour need). Alternatively, if you’re already very sleep deprived when you go to bed at 2am, you might well wake at 10am (the body is trying to pay back sleep debt) but you’ll awake with what is called a sleep hangover — a phenomenon of circadian misalignment that will also leave you feeling off and not at your best.

While I’m no doubt making this seem very complicated, here are the main takeaways: the number one thing when it comes to your sleep is getting the number of hours of sleep you biologically need. The second, almost equally important thing is keeping bed and wake times that works with not against your chronotype and circadian rhythm. The third, which I’m spelling out because it’s important, but it’s fairly baked into the second thing, is these bed and wake times should stay consistent — circadian misalignment will interfere with your energy and your health independent of whether or not you’re meeting your sleep need (and meeting your sleep need will be very hard if you’re not in circadian alignment).

The last thing I’ll add is to give yourself some grace. It won’t always be possible to meet your sleep need — life happens. What’s important is being intentional about getting the sleep you need, prioritizing it as best you can, and being patient with yourself as you build new habits. If you gain a couple of hours of sleep debt one night, don’t get stressed, but make sure you make time to pay back that debt over some naps or the next few nights. Because sleep debt is a measure of how much sleep you owe your body over the past 14 nights, not just last night, you can feel somewhat liberated knowing that if you slept less than you needed last night but have otherwise been keeping your debt low that you’ll have the energy to do what matters to you today.

As an expert, this might be obvious to you, but I think it would be instructive to articulate this for our readers. Let’s imagine a hypothetical 35-year-old adult who was not getting enough sleep. After working diligently at it for 6 months he or she began to sleep well and got the requisite hours of sleep. How will this person’s life improve? Can you help articulate some of the benefits this person will see after starting to get enough sleep? Can you explain?

First, some great news. This hypothetical adult (assuming a medical condition isn’t at play) isn’t going to need to work diligently at getting the sleep he/she needs for 6 months to start feeling the benefits. If this person gets their sleep debt to 5 hours or below — something that might take a week or so, depending on how much sleep debt they start with — they will see immediate impacts across every aspect of how they feel and function.

That’s because when it comes to sleep deprivation there are two kinds: acute and chronic. Acute sleep debt is what we measure with the RISE app. It’s the running tally of how much sleep you’ve missed relative to your need over the last roughly 14 days. Chronic sleep deprivation, meanwhile, refers to sleep deprivation (less sleep than you biologically need) over months or years. When we think about the impacts of sleep deprivation, we are commonly thinking about the impacts of chronic sleep deprivation, things like an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease/heart disease, cancers, psychiatric disorders, fertility problems, and a whole host of other health problems. What’s less well known are the impacts of acute sleep debt, impacts that start to manifest as soon as staying up one hour later than you normally do! These include daytime sleepiness and fatigue, decreased attention span, focus, and productivity, a weakened immune system, increased moodiness, irritability, and impatience, changes to your metabolism including increased appetite, and an increased risk of accidents, particularly behind the wheel.

Fortunately, decades of sleep research show acute sleep debt is reversible. Paying down your debt to 5 hours or below will stop all of these aforementioned impacts in their tracks, buoying your energy, productivity, mood, and physiological functioning.

Many things provide benefits but they aren’t necessarily a priority. Should we make getting a good night’s sleep a major priority in our life? Can you explain what you mean?

Sleep is as important to our functioning as water, food, and air. A lack of sleep might not kill you as quickly as a lack of those three, but it will undermine every single aspect of your wellbeing for as long as you’re alive :)

Another angle on this is to consider how sleep is often considered — as something on par with nutrition, exercise, and meditation, for example, when it comes to your wellbeing. Truth is, sleep is the foundation on which pillars of wellbeing like nutrition or exercise or meditation rest. Racking up even middling amounts of sleep debt (5–12 hours) will have a far greater impact on your metabolism, for example, than anything you could eat in the short term.

We often say at Rise that sleep won’t fix everything, but it’s the first thing to inspect if anything feels amiss in your life. Low on energy — are you meeting your sleep need? Skin breaking out — are you meeting your sleep need? Increasing conflict in your relationships — are you meeting your sleep need? Procrastinating more than usual — are you meeting your sleep need? Craving more carby foods than usual — are you meeting your sleep need? Libido feels off — are you meeting your sleep need? The list is literally endless because sleep (specifically, whether you’re meeting your genetically-required amount of sleep) plays a role in every aspect of how we feel and function.

The truth is that most of us know that it’s important to get better sleep. But while we know it intellectually, it’s often difficult to put it into practice and make it a part of our daily habits. In your opinion what are the 3 main blockages that prevent us from taking the information that we all know, and integrating it into our lives? How should we remove those obstacles?

I think first and foremost, most of us actually discount just how important sleep is. Sleep is up there with food, water, and air in terms of its importance in keeping us alive. And if people grasp sleep’s importance to health, it’s usually with regard to long term impacts — the chronic diseases associated with a chronic, long-term lack of sleep, not the real and significant impacts from short-term, acute sleep debt. Just shaving an hour from your sleep need over the course of a week — something I’d say most all of us regularly do — has material impacts on every aspect of our functioning, downgrading everything from our immune system, to our metabolism, to our testosterone levels, to our willpower, emotional resilience, mood, alertness, decision making abilities, and even our perceived charisma! Understanding that we need to keep our sleep debt at around 5 hours or less or else start suffering like this across the board is a good first step to elevating and hopefully prioritizing sleep in our lives.

To sort of rebut the premise of your question further, I’d also add that I don’t think we necessarily all “know” the information required to get the sleep we need. If we think of sleep hygiene at all, we usually associate it with behaviors or environmental conditions we need to follow or put into play at night. The truth is, sleep hygiene concerns the upkeep of healthy behaviors from the moment we wake. There are critical things we need to do in the morning, for example, like get natural sunlight for at least 10 minutes in the first 30 minutes after waking, that set the stage for falling asleep at the right time and staying asleep that night. Understanding that most everything we do during the day (like what and when we eat, or whether and when we exercise, or how much light we’re exposed to and when) impacts our sleep is a good first step in shifting our perspective on what it means to have a healthy sleep practice.

Relatedly, if people are familiar with many tenets of sleep hygiene, they’re less aware that the timing of these behaviors matters immensely, and is pegged to their unique circadian rhythm. There’s lots of advice on things to do for better sleep, but much less information about when to do it (understandable — because it’s not one size fits all). RISE projects your daily circadian rhythm and will send you customized reminders or notifications about stopping or starting certain key behaviors throughout the day. If you don’t use our app, our sleep guide is a great resource to learn more about how to time key behaviors for better sleep.

Another blockage is the abundance of misinformation about sleep can lead to inertia or a perceived lack of agency that can hold us back. When you hear conflicting things about how much sleep you need, or that how much sleep you get doesn’t matter, or that you need to maximize time in REM, for example, it can be easy to throw up your hands and either not prioritize sleep at all or focus on the wrong thing and then get discouraged because you’re not feeling materially different in your waking hours. Focusing on the imminently actionable concept of sleep debt, by contrast, gives us one, highly impactful number to focus on. The lower our sleep debt, the better we’ll feel and function.

Another thing I think at play is that we sort of “expect” to sleep well or think it can be a thing done without practice or intention. It is absolutely true we are all biologically primed to sleep, but most of us are doing many things during the day that interfere with getting the sleep we need. Keeping your sleep debt low requires a sustained, consistent effort, just like eating well or having an exercise routine. Practicing good sleep hygiene requires building healthy habits and habit formation takes time. I think we’d be better sleepers if we realized that good sleep isn’t automatic — it’s something we need to be intentional about and patient and consistent with.

Do you think getting “good sleep” is more difficult today than it was in the past?

I think it’s certainly harder to get the sleep you need than it was before the advent of industrial lighting! Most of us, if we think we have a sleep problem, actually have a light problem. Blue light in particular is especially disruptive to sleep if viewed in the 2 hours or so before bed because it delays the production of melatonin, a key hormone for falling asleep. Our number one rec to combat electric light in the evening is to put on a pair of blue-light blocking glasses as you’re winding down for sleep. These are the ones our team wears.

I think it’s also fair to say that our mobile devices threaten sleep in more ways than just by emitting blue light. There’s been a lot of very interesting research into how the content we consume in the hours before bed affects our ability to sleep. “Pre-sleep cognitive arousal” which can protract the onset of sleep can be caused by consuming content that’s too exciting (watching serialized rather than episodic television) or otherwise too thought consuming (late night work emails).

Speaking of late night work emails, while that was definitely a thing before the pandemic and the rise of the work from home movement, the lack of boundaries caused by working from home (no commute to delineate the start and end of the workday) has also been shown to negatively impact sleep. The key is to defend your winddown time before bed. The brain and body need to decelerate as they transition to sleep. The best way to help yourself do that is to do things that relax you — our recommended activities are a hot bath or shower, light yoga, reading, and even writing to do lists, which can help reduce anxiety about everything that needs to get done and might otherwise cause you to wake at night and have difficulty falling back asleep.

That being said, I think the tide might be turning generally in how society views the importance of sleep. I’m not sure we’ll ever be rid of hustle culture, but recovery and self-care (and sleep’s role in both) are definitely becoming more culturally relevant and prioritized. So too, there’s been a recent boom in technology to help support healthy sleep, which should hopefully make it easier than ever for people to get the sleep they need to be their best.

Ok. Here is the main question of our discussion. Can you please share “5 things you need to know to get the sleep you need and wake up refreshed and energized”? If you can, kindly share a story or example for each.

1. Not everyone needs 8 hours of sleep. Your sleep “need” is a genetic trait, just like your height or eye color. If you don’t use RISE, the best way to find out your sleep need outside of a sleep lab is to go on vacation and not use an alarm for several day in a sleep-safe environment: cool, dark & quiet. See how much you sleep on the very last day — that’s likely to be your biological sleep need (on all previous days you are likely to be “out-sleeping” your sleep need to make up for lost sleep). Meeting your sleep need as consistently as possible is the very best way to be at your best. My own personal sleep need is about 8h and 20m.
2. When you need to go to bed and wake up is dictated by your chronotype — are you an early bird, night owl, or something in between? Early birds have it fairly easy in our early-bird oriented society, night owls can have a very rough time of it if they need to be on an early bird clock. It’s best to live with your chronotype, not fight against it, but if you have to shift your biological clock forward or back, know that it will continue to be an active process and that it’s not just about your bedtime — the time you wake up, exposure yourself to light, and eat will all play an important role as well.
3. Be strategic about light: light is the most powerful circadian “cue” there is. Get natural sunlight as soon after waking as possible to reset your circadian rhythm and guard against blue light in the evening before bed so that your body can wind down naturally for sleep. Circadian alignment is fairly critical to meeting your sleep need.
4. Naps count when paying down debt! Naps — if timed correctly — can help make up for lost sleep as well as provide a pick me up if you’re dragging during the day. Nap during your circadian energy dip (that’s early to mid afternoon for most of us) and don’t go longer than 90 minutes (a full sleep cycle) or you’ll risk not being sleepy enough at bedtime.
5. There are 3 critical things to remember about your sleeping environment: keep it cool, dark, and quiet. Cool = 65–68 degrees Fahrenheit. Dark = you are more sensitive to light than you can possibly imagine. We recommend blackout curtains *and* an eye mask. Quiet = if you think you’ve acclimated to the noise, you haven’t; your sleep is still being disturbed. We recommend soundproofing and earplugs. The great thing about this subset of sleep hygiene is that once you set it, you can somewhat forget it.

What would you advise someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back to sleep?

Waking up once or twice during the night is not unusual, especially at certain points in a sleep cycle. In each 60- to 120-minute cycle, you progress through different stages of sleep — from REM to light sleep to deep sleep and back up again. If something disturbs you at the end of one of those cycles — aches and pains, a full bladder, or a noise, for example — you’re more likely to wake up than when you’re in deep sleep.

For that reason alone, being diligent about sleep hygiene is key. Limit liquids in the hours before bed, and make sure your sleeping environment is well sound-proofed, for example. If waking in the middle of the night is a consistent issue I’d recommend checking whether your light exposure may be part of the problem. Ideally, you should avoid light as much as possible, at least 90 minutes, before bed. Light is the most potent external influence on your body’s internal clock so being strategic about the timing of your light exposure is key for better sleep and daily energy. Darkness is a cue for your brain to ramp up the production of melatonin and light will disrupt the process. Some suggestions would be to try using fewer or dimmer lights and/or wearing blue-light blocking glasses to avoid the blue light emitted from electronic devices.

Our best advice in general for avoiding midnight wakenings that you can’t easily fall back asleep from is to go to bed during your “Melatonin Window.” This is a roughly hour long window at night when your natural melatonin production is the highest it will be all night, giving you the best chance of falling asleep quickly and staying asleep. The RISE app will tell you when that window is for you each night. (Light exposure too late at night will delay your Melatonin Window, so know that mitigating light at night and going to bed during your Melatonin Window go hand in hand for restful sleep.)

If you’re awake in the middle of the night, however, and can’t fall back to sleep, sleep medicine specialists recommend a few different things:

First and foremost, don’t panic. The more accepting you can be in the moment, the better your chances of getting back to sleep.

Secondly, don’t ignore the cause. If you awaken because you need to use the restroom do so. If it’s because you’re hot, adjust the thermostat. Trying to fall back asleep despite these things will likely prove to be difficult.

Additionally, you’ll want to avoid lights, clocks, and screens. Light exposure and mental stimulation will do more harm than good and watching the clock will only feed into the tendency to worry about and calculate the amount of sleep you’re losing.

The best thing to do is to focus on your breathing, taking slow and controlled deep breaths (for example the 4–7–8 pranayama breathing technique may be helpful) and/or use relaxation techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation which only requires you tense different muscle groups as you inhale to relax your body making it easier to fall asleep.

What are your thoughts about taking a nap during the day? Is that a good idea, or can it affect the ability to sleep well at night?

Taking a nap during the day can definitely help improve energy levels if done strategically. Studies have shown that napping during your typical midday energy dip (early afternoon for most people) is the ideal time to take a nap. On the RISE app we show you exactly when that is for you. Taking a nap any later than your dip will likely interfere with your ability to sleep well at night, because you’ll relieve too much sleep pressure (sleep pressure builds throughout the day and releases while you sleep at night) to fall asleep at your intended bedtime. How long you nap for is also important. A quick 10–20 minute power nap can boost alertness without post-nap grogginess. A 90 minute nap (the length of a full sleep cycle) will help pay down more debt but leave you with some post-nap grogginess. We advise against a nap longer than 90 minutes, also for reasons of depleting too much sleep pressure. While we’re definitely pro-nap at Rise, it’s good to remember you should be getting the bulk of your sleep at night and not rely too heavily on naps for meeting your sleep need.

Wonderful. We are nearly done. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

I’m very impressed with Reed Hastings from Netflix. I love the product, but I’m more so a fan of the culture he’s built. On top of that, I’d beg him to open up an API so we make Netflix more intentional about protecting sleep. He’s often said that sleep is Netflix’s biggest competitor. While Netflix has great shareholder returns, it’s also perpetuating the public health crisis.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can learn more about my work and the RISE app by visiting https://www.risescience.com/ or downloading the app on iOS here or on the Google Play Store here.

This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!