How Much Is a Good Night’s Sleep Worth? If You’re Aetna, the Answer Is $1.25

Aetna plans to pay employees $25 for every 20 nights they get at least seven hours of sleep.

Inception

If you’ve ever wished you could get paid to sleep, you might want to see if Aetna is hiring. As Slate reports:

According to Aetna communications director Ethan Slavin, employees who participate in Aetna’s Healthy Lifestyles program earn $25 for every 20 nights in which they sleep seven hours or more, with a cap of $300 per year. That means that if they sleep seven hours or more on 240 days per year, they’ll get the full $300.

Those 20 nights (or 240 days) don’t have to be continuous, either; Slavin told Slate that a “bad night” doesn’t reset the counter. We all know there are some nights where you just don’t get enough sleep, whether it’s a sick child or an upset stomach or a business trip or any number of other factors. The important thing is that you get at least seven hours of sleep two thirds of the time.

I have at least seven reactions to this news, so let’s tick them off the way we count hours on insomniac nights:

1. “At least seven hours of sleep per night for 66 percent of a calendar year” isn’t enough sleep for me. I don’t know about you, but I need 7.5 hours minimum to feel good, and I’ve been lucky and privileged enough to structure my life to make that a priority.
2. There is a huge element of privilege in “who gets enough sleep,” even though I’m not sure whether “privilege” is the right word here. Let’s just say that health issues, caretaking responsibilities, the ability to set your own schedule, the ability to have the same schedule every day, the times at which you can eat, the times at which you can exercise, the amount of relaxation time between the last event of your day and the time you go to bed, internal and external stressors, etc. etc. etc. all affect how much sleep you get, and only some of those factors are within your control.
3. I wish we lived in a culture where you didn’t have to live a privileged life to get enough sleep, and where “at least seven hours, two-thirds of the time” wasn’t seen as aspirational.
4. But what about the people who just aren’t going to hit those sleep goals, for any of the reasons I listed above? An employer who tracks sleep may not be aware of their employees’ extraneous circumstances, but that employer will be aware that those employees are not living a “healthy lifestyle.” Does an employer need to know that? Do those employees want their employer to know that?
5. What about people who don’t need as much sleep? Are they going to be viewed as “unhealthy,” even though that may not be the case?
6. Although employees have the option to enter sleep records manually, Aetna also collects sleep information via wearable fitness tracker. I’m curious how much other information the trackers collect: what time an employee goes to bed, how many times the employee wakes up to use the toilet, etc. I’d rather not have an employer watching my sleep habits that closely.
7. Sometimes fitness trackers aren’t accurate. I constantly make manual adjustments to my Fitbit records because Fitbit tracks “watching The Magicians” as sleeping. (It also regularly doubles food entries and doesn’t adjust my BMR during my menstrual cycle.)

Now that you’ve heard my initial reactions to Aetna’s program, let’s see what The New York Times has to say about Aetna’s wellness initiatives:

More than one-quarter of the company’s work force of 50,000 has participated in at least one class, and those who have report, on average, a 28 percent reduction in their stress levels, a 20 percent improvement in sleep quality and a 19 percent reduction in pain. They also become more effective on the job, gaining an average of 62 minutes per week of productivity each, which Aetna estimates is worth $3,000 per employee per year. Demand for the programs continues to rise; every class is overbooked.

Aetna gets $3,000 in additional value per employee per year, and plans to pay employees $300 to get the sleep required to produce that value.

That sounds like an employer’s dream come true.