I get better sleep now than I did a few years ago - before I had a newborn.

Let’s be honest - sleep, both falling asleep and staying asleep, has been a “thing” for me for most of my life. A typical overachiever, I valued productivity over rest and recovery and I paid the price for it by staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night. This only got worse after I launched a startup. In 2020 I launched Apollo to help the world deal with stress and get better sleep - the thing I was always struggling to find time for. 

Apollo has taught me a lot. I learned that firing on all possible cylinders all the time actually made me worse, not better. I learned how important recovery and sleep were for my nervous system and that I was so much better at my job if I made some space for recovery.

And then…in December of last year, I became a first time mom. 

I used to wake up in the night with the worries and stresses of the day running through my mind. Now I have more immediate needs to address, those of my baby boy. 

While having a newborn is definitely not a new wellness hack - what I can tell you is that I get better sleep now than I did a few years ago before I had a newborn. How? SmartVibes.

Dr. Dave built SmartVibes to help me sleep through the night

Dr. Dave is my co-founder and my husband. I can tell you that Dave has 0 sleep problems. His head just hits the pillow and zzzZZZzzz. That said, he definitely noticed that I woke up in the night and sometimes couldn’t get back to sleep for a long while. 

We knew that Apollo helped me fall asleep, but could it help me stay asleep? This is where Apollo’s first AI algorithms were born. Dave built the SmartVibes AI  to predict when I would wake up in the night, based on changes in my movements, and then it would respond to me when I stirred by sending gentle vibration patterns that would relax my body back to sleep without waking me up. Genius.

Just Look At This:

Screenshots of Kathryn's SmartVibes digest

Last night, my baby Sammy woke up several times during the night for his midnight and 2 am and 4 am and… 6 am… snacks. Obviously, I need to wake up to feed him, but Apollo has my back. While I’m nursing him, my Stay Asleep Vibe plays, keeping my body relaxed. When I put him back down  - I go back to sleep immediately. You can see the transition from the light blue Awake to the dark blue Sleep line in my data. All in all, by helping me fall back asleep just as soon as Sammy is back in his bassinet, I got nearly an hour more sleep than I would have on my own.

The SmartVibes Stay Asleep feature is basically a Snoo for non-babies

For anyone who has ever heard of the Snoo: Apollo’s Stay Asleep feature is basically a Snoo for non-babies. Snoo is a crib that listens for your baby's cry and literally rocks the baby back to sleep with a swaying motion and wooshing sounds. Like the Snoo, Apollo senses that you’re about to wake up or have woken up and shooshes you back to sleep with gentle vibrations.

So, even though I’m waking up in the middle of the night for very different reasons than I used to, I wake up feeling pretty good because I can maximize how much sleep I can get by not lying awake staring at the ceiling after I feed my little one.

I wake up feeling pretty good

What does that mean? I wake up feeling pretty good. I am back to work full time and even with a newborn, feeling clear and calm.  Honestly, it’s a Godsend. I’m so excited that we’ve used AI for something so profoundly useful for so many - giving people the gift of a good night’s rest.