The Incredible Science Behind This Self-Warming, Self-Cooling Bed

Sleep tracking can unquestionably help you establish better habits which allow for a more restful night’s sleep. By keeping track of the nights that you toss and turn, you can identify potential explanations for your sub-optimal slumber. Maybe it’s the time of week that’s got you anxious. Maybe it was the cheeseburger you had for lunch. Paying attention is just the start, though.

The Eight Sleep tracker took my sleep to the next level by helping me identify how a good night’s sleep was also dependent on my distance to Friday. By making Mondays and Tuesdays the target of my efforts to cut down on booze and screen time, I received the added benefit of sleeping better when I most needed those zzzs.

Changing your habits is only one element of getting a good night’s rest. The environment also matters: No one’s getting a good night’s sleep if the radiator is busted or, worse, a dilapidated air conditioner finally kicks out during the dog days of August.

“Eight Sleep is back with a wildly futuristic new take on its signature mattress.”

To solve the local environmental factors that affect your sleep, Eight Sleep is back with a wildly futuristic new take on its signature mattress. Its new Pod, available now, not only tracks your sleep, offers suggestions for improvements, and integrates with your smart home — it also literally keeps your bed warmer or cooler, whichever you need to get the best night’s rest possible.

I had the privilege of trying Eight Sleep’s new bed last week during a visit to its New York City office. In the well-appointed room they use for bed demos, Eight Sleep’s reps showed me how the Pod allows one or two sleepers to set the temperature of their side of the mattress on a range of 55 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

Despite the many components within the bed — sensors to measure your body temperature and heart rate, an active grid to provide thermoregulation — it still offered ideal bounceability. The side of the bed set to warm felt like it’d been lying under a heat lamp, ready for me to crawl into after a day on the slopes. The cooled half felt like it’d been left overnight next to a cracked-open window.

Eight Sleep’s Pod is also designed to get better the more you use it. After deploying its “dynamic temperature” feature, the app will use the biometric data it collects to keep its temperature optimal.

Over time, the feature will learn how to automatically adjust the temperature of your bed to try to keep you from waking up.

To deliver on the dynamic temperature feature, Eight Sleep’s engineers had to use a unique combination of new software (A.I. to collect data from your sensors and regulate your temperature better) and hardware (a heat sink capable of raising or lowering the temperature without a loud fan or other noise).

Perhaps the coolest way to wake up with Eight Sleep is literally just that. The “thermo alarm” enables you to wake up more naturally and without disturbing a sleeping partner. Here’s how it works: The bed begins to gradually cool several minutes prior to your set wake-up time, which should make rousing yourself easier.

So how does one make a bed that’s both unspeakably tricked-out and comfy? The custom design allows you to heat or cool the bed completely imperceptibly. It’s a much better alternative to sleeping with an A/C or fan running.

Eight Sleep is the only company on the market with a bed this sophisticated. It’ll keep you warm or cool, whatever floats your sleeping self’s boat. It’ll still empower you with the same sleep tracking functionality that lets you take your sleep fitness into your own hands.

Once you’ve conked out, it’ll continue quietly cooling or warming your mattress on your behalf, solving one of sleep’s biggest problems. You can reserve your Pod for just $95, and they’ll begin shipping in April, just in time to pinch hit for your broken A/C when it inevitably lets you down this summer.