dredev

This is amazing! It almost never hallucinates. How did you guys accomplish that?

I experienced chronic insomnia for over a year and definitely felt the impact it had on my physical and mental health. Two interesting things that I learn about insomnia from my experience:

1. I thought I could "will" myself to overcome my insomnia, but realized quickly that for chronic insomnia (defined loosely as at least 3 nights a week for 3 months or more), symptoms typically worsens over time and becomes harder to resolve if left untreated.

2. People who suffer from insomnia are often painfully unaware of how disruptive it is to their everyday lives. I thought I was doing OK, but turned out that I've gotten so used to getting poor sleep that I have forgotten what life was like before. People who are sleep-deprived consistently underestimate how sleep-deprived they are.

https://slumber.one/blog/understanding-insomnia

This is a great rule to follow, and for precisely the right reasons. Staying in bed trying to force yourself to sleep is generally counterproductive, because (1) over the long-run, that creates a negative association in your mind between your bed and being a place of wakefulness, and (2) trying but failing to fall asleep might make you anxious/stressed about not being able to fall asleep, which could put you into a negative feedback cycle that makes it even harder for fall asleep.

Joe, we do have patient assistance plans available to make our app accessible to everyone. If you email us at hello@slumber.one and mention that Ed from HN sent you, we'd be more than happy to help.

Pete, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

CBT-I isn’t just “sleep hygiene by a better name”. Sleep hygiene is one component of CBT-I, but there are several other components to it like cognitive restructuring, stimulus control, sleep restriction…etc. Here are a few articles that you might find helpful: https://slumber.one/how-does-cbt-i-work, https://www.sleepfoundation.org/insomnia/treatment/cognitive...

The latest research confirms that CBT-I with sleep restriction therapy is an effective treatment for insomnia: (here’s a meta-analysis you might find helpful https://bmcprimcare.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-... and here’s an article by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine https://sleepeducation.org/sleep-restriction-therapy-insomni...). From our conversations with our clinical advisors and sleep experts, for the right patient, sleep restriction remains an important and effective tool in using behavioral therapy to treat insomnia and has worked for tens of thousands of patients.

While I empathize with you that there could be more research done in the sleep space, behavioral therapy for insomnia and sleep restriction therapy are both highly proven both by sleep researchers and in real-world clinical practice.

Glad that you find our app helpful! Please feel free to reach out at hello@slumber.one if you have any questions or feedback :D

Hi there, you're right that we're not competing against in-person therapy and many patients might prefer having an actual specialist to talk to. That being said, our program works for over 80% of our users and we're just as effective as in-person treatment. We're also running a clinical study with Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital to prove the efficacy of our program.

We understand that not everyone can afford our program. Please email us at hello@slumber.one if you have difficulty paying for our program and we can find something that works for you!

Hi there, you're right that $188 is not cheap. That's why we offer a 7-day free trial so that you have some time to decide if our app is right for you. More importantly, we have a 30-day money-back guarantee and you can request for a refund, no questions asked.

Regarding efficacy, our program works for over 80% of our users and we're just as effective as in-person treatment. In comparison, seeing an in-person treatment specialist costs about $150-200 per session without insurance, or $25-$50 per session with insurance. Typically, you would see an in-person specialist every week or every other week.

That being said, we understand that not everyone can afford our program. Please email us at hello@slumber.one if you have difficulty paying for our program and we can find something that works for you!

Glad that this rule works for you! There are also other rules you might find helpful as part of stimulus control. For example:

1. Use the bed only for sleep and sex 2. Get out of bed if unable to fall asleep within 20 minutes 3. Have a plan-of-action for what to do if woken up in the middle of the night

That being said, behavioral therapy for insomnia is not just about stimulus control or sleep hygiene. This is because there is little evidence that sleep hygiene alone is sufficient to treat chronic insomnia. Instead, we use a multi-component therapy that includes cognitive restructuring, sleep restriction or consolidation, and relaxation techniques.

You can read more about it at https://slumber.one/how-does-cbt-i-work.

Hi! Thanks for your feedback! We were partly inspired by Noom (https://www.noom.com/) and the success they have with longer surveys. That being said, we're definitely hearing the feedback here, and will look into either how we can simplify our survey or offer an option to bypass it.

Great to hear that you found something that works for you. If guided meditation works for you almost every night, then you should certainly stick with it! For many of our patients (including myself), guided meditation worked in the short term but then stopped working because it didn’t actually resolve their underlying insomnia (e.g., for me, a lot of my insomnia came from distortive thoughts I had about sleep).

Our app is different from pure meditation/relaxation apps that offer “rain sounds”. Instead, we go through a psychology-based program (behavioral therapy) that walks you through the underlying causes of insomnia, helps you address the ones that are relevant to you, and uses techniques like sleep restriction therapy to limit the amount of time you spend in bed.

I’ll give an example. Let’s say when you go to bed at night, you’re constantly thinking about unfinished todos or worrying about some big upcoming event. While meditation and “rain sounds” might help distract you enough to fall asleep, what if you stopped having those thoughts in bed in the first place? That’s what our app aims to do.

In terms of pricing, we do offer a free, 7-day trial and our price ends up being about $45 per month. In comparison, seeing an in-person treatment specialist costs about $150-200 per session without insurance, or $25-$50 per session with insurance. Typically, you would see an in-person specialist every week or every other week.

We offer a 7-day free trial after which we charge about $45 per month. In comparison, seeing an in-person treatment specialist costs about $150-200 per session without insurance, or $25-$50 per session with insurance. Typically, you would see an in-person specialist every week or every other week.

Hi! Thanks for your feedback! We were partly inspired by Noom (https://www.noom.com/) and the success they have with longer surveys and embedding marketing messages in the interstitial. That being said, we're still iterating and learning. I think the hardest part for us is striking a balance between keeping the survey short but still informative so that it is useful to our users.

Glad that this resonates with you! The long waiting time it takes to see a specialist is exactly why we decided to build this app. My primary care doctor actually told me that he was often forced to choose between putting his patients with insomnia on months-long waiting list to see a therapist (which is the recommended first line treatment) and prescribing sleeping pills, and neither is desirable. Many of the sleep therapists we worked with to develop the program have also told us that they are so backed up with requests for sleep help, especially during COVID.

We used Flutter for the mobile app, and it's Django in the backend with Postgres as our database. Our infrastructure is hosted on GCP. This is actually my first time building on flutter and was pleasantly surprised by how solid the developer experience was. I was choosing between react native and flutter, but had a terrible experience with react native for one of my projects back in college, so decided to give flutter a try.