A Skeptic's Guide to Sleepmaxxing

by Brian Dunning
April 21, 2026

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If you are one who eagerly follows wellness influencers on TikTok, you have no doubt heard of the fad of sleepmaxxing — spelled with two Xs, because why not — a way to “hack” your sleeping, and thus derive a vast array of health benefits which the rest of us are denied. Ordinary sleeping, we’re told (the type all animals have practiced for hundreds of millions of years) is fundamentally broken and non-functional, and will throw you into a spiral of fatigue and disease. Luckily, online influencers in their twenties with no relevant education have uncovered the secrets that have eluded all living creatures and generations of sleep scientists: a combination of practices and products (of course products) that will turbocharge your sleep, make you healthier than healthy, and improve every aspect of your life.

Sleep is, of course, very important. Sleep is when your body and brain go to work. Your body restores and heals; your brain organizes and properly stores the day’s memories. It’s necessary to maintain decent overall health and for normal cognitive and memory function. However, sleep can also be difficult for creatures like ourselves who tend to do things like injure our bodies and develop chronic pain, and to gain weight to make sleeping and breathing difficult, and to wrestle with complicated emotional and psychological issues that distract us and prevent our brains from letting us fall into the required peaceful state. Sleep disorders can be both serious and complicated to solve.

Consequently, sleep science has long been an important field of study. Sleep doctors now have a pretty good array of treatments for those whom sleep eludes. The first line of defense is sleep hygiene: Managing the conditions in your bedroom, minimizing naps, avoiding late alcohol, and other behaviors. There is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) to help you change thoughts and behaviors that cause wakefulness. There are devices like CPAP machines to assist the breathing-challenged with better nighttime breathing. And, as a last resort, there are drugs for more immediate, short-term, high-powered attacks on any of these causes of sleep interruption. Any good sleep doctor should be able to dramatically improve the sleeping of nearly any person who suffers from sleep deprivation — if that person is willing to put in the work.

Not everyone is; and that brings us to online influencers, one group of people pitching magically easy solutions to complicated problems. Sleepmaxxing influencers, however, don’t merely promise to help those with sleeping problems achieve better natural sleep; they pledge to turn anyone into a sleeping powerhouse who will wake up more supercharged than anyone else. If you are an experienced Skeptoid listener, you’ve heard some variation of this a thousand times before: No matter the problem, someone is selling a magically easy solution — often when there isn’t even a problem.

Sleepmaxxing comes with fortuitous timing. Many online communities, particularly in the wellness space, are experiencing elevating concerns about self-care, mental health, and burnout; so it lands among a community particularly well primed to embrace any solution to those woes.

Like most wellness fads, it blends a certain amount of common-sense level recommendations —is this case, much of basic sleep hygiene — with its pseudoscientific recommendations. This gives it the skin-deep appearance of legitimacy. And it deceptively rebrands those sleep hygiene practices as sleepmaxxing: “Oh, I see you’re avoiding caffeine before bedtime; good for you for doing sleepmaxxing!” No. That’s just basic sleep hygiene, which has been understood since the 1800s.

From there, sleepmaxxing descends into an abyss of woo. Let’s go through some of its basic recommendations one at a time, beginning with:

Mouth taping

This is probably the most commonly heard technique from sleepmaxxing influencers. Tape is placed over the mouth to prevent mouth breathing and reduce snoring, supposedly resulting in better sleep quality. What kind of tape? Not just any tape — but special “mouth tape” you can buy from those very same influencers! I found headlines like “Top 5 Mouth Tapes for 2026” and “3 Best Mouth Tapes For Beards”.

For many people, taping your mouth at night is unlikely to cause you any problems beyond discomfort and irritation. Also, keeping your mouth shut for seven or eight hours at a stretch is going to make a nice bacterial breeding ground, since the flow of saliva is likely to be greatly reduced or even stopped for the duration. Over time you’re likely to have more dental issues and bad breath. But all of this can be addressed by upping your oral hygiene game.

But for some, the effects of mouth taping can be much worse, which is why you won’t find it recommended by sleep therapists. Difficulty breathing is the biggest risk. All you need is to be a bit congested at night, and if you fall asleep with the tape on, your oxygen intake can be greatly reduced. Panic attacks are somewhat common; the sensation of being unable to open your mouth can trigger anxiety which can last all night, a huge enemy of restful sleep. The worst case is asphyxiation, a possibility for some with a nasal obstruction; however, if this is going to happen to you, you’re pretty likely to notice your inability to breathe long before you actually fall asleep.

A 2025 literature review published in PLOS One looked at dozens of studies on mouth taping. Evidence of any benefits was rare and inconsistent, and as for the risks, the study concluded simply “It seems that there is a potentially serious risk of harm for individuals indiscriminately practicing this trend.”

Wearable electronics

The sleepmaxxing influencer not prominently displaying their wearable electronic sleep tracking products is virtually unheard of; they are yet more products that can be hawked. These include the Apple Watch, the Oura Ring, the WHOOP, the Eight Sleep Pod, the RISE phone app, Garmin devices, and more. Influencers advocate checking your sleep studies religiously to identify trends and make various adjustments to your routines.

It’s hard to imagine any creature from the past hundred million years actually being able to sleep without analyzing each night’s data to make routine changes.

The problem that this causes — almost invariably — is that people find themselves stuck pursuing elusive perfect scores, triggering anxiety which worsens sleep. Sleep researchers have found that the popularity of these sleep trackers has grown so much that the distress deserves a whole new diagnosis all its own: it’s called orthosomnia, an unhealthy obsession with achieving perfect sleep, driven by anxiety over the data from wearable fitness trackers and apps.

Supplements

Influencers typically recommend taking melatonin and magnesium supplements. Neither should be expected to produce any noticeable benefits, so you’re better off saving your money.

Melatonin is recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine for certain sleep disorders, however there is a lack of evidence that it provides any benefit in the absence of a disorder. Additionally, the amount that your body produces naturally is tiny, on the order of micrograms; whereas over-the-counter supplements typically come in milligrams — that’s three orders of magnitude too high. Logically, this would be a terrible way to subtly nudge something that is so small and precise. Some influencers even recommend megadosing on milligrams; putting that balance even farther out of whack.

Magnesium has slightly more plausible support, with some evidence showing it can help with poor sleep quality. However, like melatonin, the evidence is strongest in the presence of a disorder such as insomnia, and strongest with older adults. Magnesium, however, is more pharmacologically active, and has quite a few drug interactions; so it should always be taken with caution, and the only sound recommendation is to do it under your doctor’s supervision. Absolutely do not take it because a social media influencer said to.

Blue light glasses

Sleepmaxxing influencers recommend wearing blue light glasses for the last few hours of the day before going to bed — some even recommend wearing them to bed. The purpose is inspired by the same reason your phone has a night mode, where after a certain time in the evening, its color will shift to a warmer hue. The idea is the higher amount of blue light in daylight is an important indicator for your brain to maintain your circadian rhythm. If there’s blue light, the brain thinks it’s daytime, and does not produce enough melatonin for quality sleep. Wearing blue light glasses is claimed to block out all the blue light.

The problem is blue light glasses are typically clear. If anything they have an invisible UV coating to block ultraviolet light; however, UV is not relevant to your brain — only the color that you can perceive. Tests have shown that the typical blue light glasses block only about 10-20% of the blue end of the spectrum; whereas 90% blocking of blue light at the 420nm wavelength would be necessary to meaningfully intervene with your circadian rhythm.

Regardless, the amount of blue in your home’s ambient light is very near the bottom of important environmental cues that can impact your sleep. Definitely don’t waste money on blue light glasses.

More... “extreme” nonsense

So far as I could find, there’s been only one death caused by sleepmaxxing influencer recommendations, and it happened in China in 2024. A few influencers have recommended “sleep hanging,” which is (horrifyingly) exactly what it sounds like. You hang yourself by the neck, just not with the noose tight enough to cause total asphyxiation; and if that’s not insane enough for you, you’re supposed to swing. Why? Obviously there is no why. Everything about this notion is crazy, wrong, and dangerous.

From what little information has trickled into the English language media, an influencer named Sun Rongchun in China was advocating this for pain relief for people with cervical problems; it’s an extreme version of the actual traction therapies used by doctors. People who tried it also reported getting better sleep. So one guy tried it for that reason alone — a 57-year-old man in Chongqing in early 2024 — and it turned out to be the last thing he ever tried.

Notice that on the whole, these sleepmaxxing interventions are almost all counterproductive, actually making the problem they claim to solve worse. The result? All too often, the destructive behavior feeds on itself, digging ever deeper into the sleepmaxxing obsession, trying to achieve improvement, but producing only worsening. And so the influencers become more and more popular as their followers get more and more desperate.

That researchers have had to create a whole new diagnosis, orthosomnia, should be enough of a red flag to scare you away from following social media sleep influencers; it shows that they are doing real harm. Get rid of your sleep tracker. Stop taking bedtime supplements. Make your room as comfortable as you like it, and enjoy your private resting time the way you like to. If you’re having some particular problem with sleep, help is available: scientifically proven help, from your local sleep doctor, to whom your regular doctor will be happy to give you a referral.

And if you’re not having a problem with sleep, the last thing you should be trying to do is to fix that. If you’re not springing out of bed feeling like Superman every morning, it doesn’t mean you’re not taking enough supplements or buying the right gadgets from the right influencers. It means you’re human, like the rest of us; and that’s not always such a terrible thing.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning