SleepHub® buyer's guide

SleepHub® is a ground-breaking sleep aid designed to help address sleep issues, not mask them.

Powered by science, SleepHub® has been exclusively developed to retrain your brain out of poor sleeping habits, so you can form healthy sleeping patterns that will help restore your mental, physical and cognitive wellbeing.

Positioned beside you as you sleep, SleepHub’s® high-quality audio speakers deliver scientifically developed rhythms and pulses which emulate brain activity that occurs during sleep cycles. This ground-breaking technology will help you fall asleep and guide you through natural sleep cycles. With repeated and regular use of SleepHub®,  your brain can learn to sleep well again.

Not to be confused with ever-popular white noise sound machines and apps, SleepHub® and its’ unique pure tone sound technology is the culmination of more than 10 years of scientific research and development.

Key features of SleepHub®

•   Uses exclusive sound technology to guide you through natural sleep cycles

•   Built using scientific insights, backed by more than 10 years of research and development

•   High-quality touch screen and two audio speakers

•   4 sleep modes to choose from, to help you achieve your optimal sleep

•   Helps with falling asleep and improving quality of sleep

•   Helps insomnia and other sleep issues

•   Retrains your brain to restore natural sleeping patterns

•   Plays optional soundscapes, such as white noise, rain and ocean sounds.

•   An alternative to sleeping tablets

•   Helps to fix sleep issues, not mask them

•   WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity

•   Play your own music via Bluetooth

•   Choice of White or Black

Your journey to better sleep starts with SleepHub®. Find out more about how SleepHub® works, below.

SleepHub® works by playing pure tones that we call ‘sleep sounds’. These are psychoacoustic sounds with sinusoidal waveforms to be exact! Sound technical? It is! Exclusive to SleepHub®, sleep sounds emulate the waves created by the brain during sleep cycles to help you fall asleep and improve your quality of sleep. SleepHub® will guide you through natural sleep cycles to promote healthy and quality sleep.

Normal sleep cycles should always appear in a specific sequence, however poor sleep habits, lifestyle factors and other circumstances can disrupt healthy sleeping patterns. Over time, your brain can forget the correct sequence and this is where difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep can take hold. Regular and repeated use of your SleepHub® will help to retrain your brain to produce the right sleep sequence and restore sleeping patterns naturally. 

“With increasingly demanding lifestyles and everyday worries, the brain can gradually fall out of sync with natural sleep cycles. By understanding the science behind a good night’s sleep, we have been able to develop a product that helps the brain return to those natural sleep cycles and improves health and wellbeing.”  - Dr Julian Stone, CEO, Cambridge Sleep Sciences. 

SleepHub® has been created for people who; 

•   Want to improve their sleep

•   Suffer with sleep problems and want to find a way back to better sleep

•   Already sleep well but want to improve their sleep further to optimise their performance, in particular athletes and sports people.

Problems with sleep

Research from Cambridge Sleep Sciences shows as much as 52% of the population of the UK have difficulty getting to sleep, often taking longer than 20 minutes to drop off. Problems with sleep can have a serious impact in all aspects of life, including mental, physical and cognitive health.

Common sleep problems include;

•   Trouble getting to sleep

•   Trouble staying asleep / waking frequently

•   Poor quality sleep

•   Not enough sleep

•   Sleep anxiety

•   Insomnia

•   Irregular or disrupted sleep patterns, such as jet lag and shift work.

Often, our lifestyles can get in the way and disrupt good sleeping patterns. For example, travelling to other time zones and the resulting jet lag can cause havoc with our circadian rhythm. As can professions with the requirement to do shift work. Even the hour clock change to and from British Summer Time is enough to disrupt our routines.

Age recommendation

SleepHub® has been developed to support adults in restoring their natural sleep cycles that may have been disrupted and forgotten over time.

Babies, children and teenagers have very different sleep patterns to an adult. Adult sleeping patterns generally settle in very late teens to early twenties. Therefore, we recommend that SleepHub® is only used for adults over the age of 21. 

Using SleepHub® to achieve better sleep means you will be addressing problems with sleep, rather than just masking them.

When you start to regain natural sleep patterns through regular and repeated use of SleepHub® the benefits you may experience include:

 •   Feeling more relaxed at bedtime

•   Drifting to sleep easier

•   Waking less frequently

•   Getting back to sleep quicker if you do wake up

•   Feeling more refreshed when you get up

•   Reduced daytime tiredness

•   Better mental, cognitive and physical performance during waking hours

•   Stress reduction in everyday life

•   Reduced headaches and migraines

•   Increase in focus

•   Overall wellbeing. 

Each person who uses SleepHub® will experience sleep improvements at varying rates. During the 10+ years of developing SleepHub®,  our research has shown that some people report benefits within a few days while others experience improvements after several weeks.

We recommend repeated and regular use of SleepHub® in order to restore your natural sleep patterns - practice really is key. The best way to break any bad habit is with repetition of a good one and like any training this can take time.

Your SleepHub® can deliver a range of sounds, settings and sleep modes to meet your ideal sleep experience. Finding the settings that suit you best may take several rounds of trialling different combinations. 

Don’t forget that external factors such as nutrition, exercise and stress etc, may affect your expected sleep experience. And creating the right sleep environment, such as having a room temperature around 18°C, removing sources of light in your room and reducing screen use in the bedroom can also help to improve your sleep. 

Keep a sleep journal to track your improvements

As you embark on your journey towards improved sleep, it is advised that you keep a sleep journal, to help track changes, and improve habits. Use your sleep journal to record your experiences and, as you progress on your journey, you should be able to see what improvements you have observed.

Noticing improvements with your sleep? 

How long should SleepHub® be used for is a common question. It is important that you continue to use your SleepHub® long after you have started feeling a difference in order to continue building on the progress you have made. This repeated practice will continue to recondition your brain to retain natural sleeping patterns in the correct sequence over a long period of time. 

When you first begin using SleepHub®, you may find that you dream and have vivid or lucid dreams more than usual.

Most scientists consider true dreaming to occur in REM sleep.We believe that because of the nature of the SleepHub® sleep sounds, you will be getting a better and deeper quality of sleep in all stages of the sleep cycle. Therefore, during REM sleep stages, you are likely to experience more vivid dreams and remember them upon waking because your REM sleep stages are adjusting to the new pattern. These should subside over time once the new pattern has been established. 

In its’ right quantity and quality, sleep can vastly improve our overall wellbeing and everyday mental, physical and cognitive performance. This is something which is commonly underrated and taken for granted.

Athletes and sports people put a lot of emphasis on getting the right amount of rest and sleep because it’s crucial for aiding performance and recovery.

Getting consistent sleep, which has all 5 natural sleep cycles in the right order is a lost art for many of us, which is where SleepHub® helps to regain those normal and natural sleeping patterns.

According to Healthline.com, poor sleep can be linked to:

•   Increased appetite

•   Impaired brain function

•   Poor exercise performance

•   Weight gain

•   Increased appetite

•   Greater risk of heart disease and stroke

•   Risk of prediabetes and type 2 diabetes

•   Inflammation

•   Poor social and emotional interaction.

Good sleep can improve:

•   Mood and wellbeing

•   Concentration

•   Productivity

•   Memory

•   Problem-solving

•   Immune system function

•   Maximise athletic performance, including speed, accuracy, reaction and recovery times.

Read on to find out about what happens when we sleep and just how much sleep we really need.

Although falling asleep may feel like your brain and body is shutting down, there is actually a lot happening within your brain. During a typically ‘good’ nights’ sleep, the brain moves through five different cycles of sleep and within each cycle there are different sleep stages and electrical patterns or brain waves that occur.

Sleep stages and sleep cycles

Before we fall asleep, there is usually a time of relaxed wakefulness or drowsiness. Our brain activity slows down and we fall into stage 1 of non-REM sleep. This stage only lasts a few minutes as we are drifting off. Then follows stage 2 of non-REM sleep. During this stage there are no eye movements or dreaming and you can easily be woken up.

Sleep then deepens into stage 3 non-REM sleep, where rolling eye movements occur. Heart rate and breathing rate is regular during non-REM sleep.

After about an hour of non-REM sleep, sleep lightens, and briefly passes through stages 2 and 1 again. 

Following this, the first episode of REM sleep occurs. This stage will last around 10 - 20 minutes. Eyes move rapidly, heart rate and breathing rate become irregular.

After completing one full sequence of non-REM and REM sleep, this is called a sleep cycle.

The second episode of non-REM sleep progresses much like the first, and after about an hour, returns rapidly through stages 2 and 1 to another episode of REM sleep. This second REM episode lasts longer than the first - about 30 minutes. The third episode of non-REM sleep includes less stage 3 non-REM sleep, perhaps none. Again, after about an hour, there is a return to REM sleep, and that third bout of REM is usually even longer than the second - about 45 minutes.

Overall, these sleep cycles of non-REM and REM sleep average about 90 minutes. After the last episode of REM sleep, we wake up. We almost always awake in the morning from the last episode of REM sleep.

Sleep researchers use a computer program and a graphic representation called a hypnogram, to track states over the sleep phase. During studies, when hypnograms are compared, the data reliably shows that the structure of human sleep is the same for nearly everyone. This is why SleepHub® can be used by so many people.

How SleepHub® can help restore your sleep cycles

In the 10+ years that SleepHub® was in development, we identified that so many of us have ‘forgotten’ how to move through the correct sleep cycles, and in their natural order. Through external factors and pressures of life, our sleeping patterns may have been disrupted for one reason or another, leading to poor sleep habits. It’s well documented that practice makes perfect - the brain responds well to repetition. This works for bad habits as well as good ones, and so you can see how poor sleep, over time, can easily lead to problems like insomnia.

With regular and repeated use of your SleepHub®,  you can relearn good sleep habits and retrain your brain to follow normal and natural sleep cycles. 

At some stage, we have all asked of ourselves ‘am I getting enough sleep?’. Exactly how much sleep should we aim to have?

A sleep duration of 8 hours is heralded by doctors and scientists as the golden standard length of time for adults. This time period allows your brain to experience all five sleep cycles, four to five times over.

Dr Chris Dickson, Chairman of Cambridge Sleep Sciences, explains why 8 hours is the optimal amount of sleep. 

“A healthy night’s sleep should last 8 hours, allowing the brain to complete all five of the cycles it needs. Breaking up your sleeping pattern can deprive you of those cycles. The first three of the brain’s cycles are important for allowing your brain to perform its basic ‘housekeeping’ duties such as memory consolidation and clearing out toxins, for which you’ll need at least 5 hours of continuous sleep. The last two cycles are thought to promote creativity and ideas.” 

In addition to using SleepHub®, there are some key things you can do to give yourself the best opportunity to improve your sleep. Here are some top tips on creating an environment that’s conducive for sleep:

A dark environment is best

Phone notifications, screens lighting up, the flashing lights of your toothbrush charger, digital clocks - they all emit light, and even in the smallest amount can be distracting when you’re trying to get to sleep, and can even disrupt your body’s circadian rhythm. 

A dark environment will help with the production of the sleep hormone - melatonin - which plays an important part in helping us get to sleep. So, find ways to remove light sources in your bedroom where possible, and if you haven’t got them already, make blackout curtains high on your priority list.

Leave screens out of the bedroom

Ask yourself, do your digital devices have to be in the bedroom? With the exception of your SleepHub®, screens like TVs, laptops, tablets or phones are big distractions in the bedroom, and ideally should be kept away from the sanctuary of your bed. Many people with insomnia will turn to their screens when they’re awake in the middle of the night, but this can cause havoc with your circadian rhythm and be really unhelpful at helping you to get back to sleep. If you must have your phone in the bedroom with you, definitely make sure your notifications are not going to disturb you during the night and put the phone face down so the screen light isn’t likely to wake you. And if you do wake during the night? Try not to look at your phone, and try calming breathing exercises instead.

Get comfortable

If your bed isn’t comfy, that’s going to affect your body physically as well as the quality of your sleep. It’s worth investing in a mattress that supports you well and gives you a good, comfortable sleeping posture.

Consider the comfort of your bedroom space too. A tidy bedroom will help create a calm environment, so there’s merit in putting that pile of washing away! 

Get the room temperature just right

The recommended bedroom temperature for adults is around 18°C (65°F), give or take a few degrees. This relates to your body’s internal temperature regulation. Because of this, a room temperature that is too warm can cause you to be restless and disrupt your sleep. Too cold or draughty and you may find it difficult to fall asleep, and impact other aspects of your health.

Reduce noises

You’ll inevitably find a noisy environment difficult to sleep in. Sudden or loud noises can be incredibly frustrating when you’re trying to sleep. Think about the possible sounds that could wake you or keep you awake, and consider what you may be able to do to prevent them happening. White noise is really good for masking other sounds, along with the other soundscapes you’ll find on your SleepHub®, so be sure to give those a try.

Activities to help you relax

Winding down before bed by doing things you find relaxing will help you to prepare for sleep. These can include having a warm bath or shower, reading a book and having a warm drink. Practices such as mindfulness, meditation, yoga and breathing techniques can also be great for unwinding. Scents like lavender and geranium are naturally calming and can help put you in the right frame of mind for sleeping. Remember, late night phone, tablet or phone use can be counter-productive for sleep.

Our resources blog provides information and advice to help you on your journey to better sleep.