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Eight Sleep vs Sleep Number Compared 

Eight Sleep vs Sleep Number Compared 
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According to the NIH, one in three adults doesn’t get proper sleep because of disruptions in falling asleep or staying asleep. An average of 60 million adults have sleep disorders, including sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome, which can exacerbate these sleep disruptions.

To that end, finding the right type of mattress can make a significant difference in sleep quality and quantity. Eight Sleep and Sleep Number offer comparable offerings designed to address common sleep disruptions, such as temperature regulation, snoring, and staying asleep. 

I’m going to review the top five sleep-related issues and how Eight Sleep and Sleep Number compare in addressing each of these. 

Eight Sleep vs. Sleep Number: What They Offer

Sleep Number has been around since 1987, likely longer than many readers today looking for a new mattress. 

During that time, they have designed:

  1. Mattresses
  2. Bedding
  3. Pillows
  4. Bed furniture (think headboards, bases, and upholstered beds)

If you start with mattresses —the foundation of your sleep —you’ll find that Sleep Number offers several types, including the Smart Pod, Performance Series, Memory Foam, and ClimateCool designs. They sell a lot of things, and the biggest selling point is buying a new mattress. However, for the sake of comparison, the only mattress that comes close to what Eight Sleep offers is the Climate360, which features a smart adjustable base, temperature control on each side, and warming + cooling options, unlike their ClimateCool, which cools by up to 15 degrees. 

Sleep Number has its new FlexFit smart base, which can be added to any mattress. This base includes:

  1. Lighting underneath (basically to serve as a nightlight)
  2. Foot warming functions
  3. Different head and foot elevation adjustments

Eight Sleep sells what is called the Pod, a complete unit with:

  1. A Base
  2. Hydropowered cover
  3. Pillow cover
  4. Blanket
  5. Hub

These can be purchased as a unit or individually. For example, if you want to keep your existing mattress but benefit from the cooling/warming technology they offer, you can buy the base and other accessories, or you can toss out your old mattress and get an entirely new setup. 

The Hub sits next to your bed or on your nightstand and connects to the rest of the system. From the Hub, your key biometrics and environmental sounds are monitored to make adjustments, for example, to the cover. 

The cover goes on your mattress and tracks your sleep, adjusting temperature accordingly so you can stay asleep more effectively. The blanket has a full body temperature control system, much the same as the pillow cover. 

Underneath your mattress, between the mattress and the bed frame, is the unique base which reduces snoring, plays sounds, and can gently lift different parts of your body to reduce pressure while you sleep. 

Eight Sleep vs. Sleep Number for Sleep Issues

Now let’s look at the different issues both Eight Sleep and Sleep Number purportedly solve with their sleep systems:

Issue #1: Snoring/Snoring Partner

If you snore, or you have a partner who snores, instead of getting separate beds, both Eight Sleep and Sleep Number seem to have a solution. 

Sleep Number’s FlexFit smart base features proprietary tech called Partner Snore, which gently raises the elevation when it senses snoring, helping whoever’s head is making the ruckus. 

Eight Sleep seems to do the same: when the base unit detects snoring, it gently elevates the head on the snoring side. Presumably, this is done without waking the other person, assuming the snoring hasn’t already done that successfully. 

So which one is best? 

Well, Sleep Number doesn’t sell the smart base on its own. 

Not only does it cost upwards of $2,000, but you can’t add it to your existing mattress; it’s exclusively sold as part of the complete bed system when you buy a new mattress.

Unless you are in the market for a new mattress, you won’t get the benefits of reduced snoring.

Eight Sleep sells its base individually (hooray), so you can hook it up to your existing bed just fine. You will have to purchase the Hub and set it up via Bluetooth so it can monitor any signs of snoring and other biometric data.

Winner:

Eight Sleep, for selling the base individually (seriously, Sleep Number? Rude.).

Issue #2: Night Sweats

If your sleep issue is waking up with night sweats, whether due to hormones or the environment, both companies have a solution. 

Sleep Number has the ClimateCool Mattress, which can only reduce the temperature on a given side by 15°. Having slept on this mattress before, I didn’t necessarily feel any cooler, and I still found myself shoving blankets off in the middle of the night. The only thing that differentiated this mattress, in my opinion, from my mattress back home was that when I turned over the arm that had been pressed against the mattress, it was physically cooler than the other one. So, clearly, the cooling technology of that mattress did something, but not much of something.

If you get cold, though, this mattress won’t help you. 

Then you need an entirely new mattress, the Climate360. This is their most expensive mattress, averaging $10,000, which is probably why it includes the $2,000 smart adjustable base. It has active cooling and warming temperature control on each side. 

According to the website, it can only change hot or cold temperatures by 15° in either direction, which amounts to roughly 52.5 minutes more restful sleep per night. 

Pass. 

So then you look at the Eight Sleep cover, for example, part of the whole Pod, and you’ll see that it reaches temperatures between 55° F and 110° F on either side. This is a substantially wider range of heating and cooling technology. Moreover, it tracks your sleep biometrics and temperature throughout the night, so if you have settings that indicate how cool or hot you want to be, it will adjust the temperature on your side of the bed to match those settings.

The best part?

It doesn’t require you to buy a new mattress, nor does it cost the same as a down payment on a house; you can remove the bedding from your mattress, add the cover to your existing mattress just like you would a fitted sheet, connect it to the Hub, and start sleeping normally again. 

Plus, their website claims up to a 34% increase in deep sleep, which in my case is significantly longer than the comparable 52.5 minutes from Sleep Number. 

Winner:

Eight Sleep for their proprietary cover. 

Issue #3: Cold Feet

Depending on where you live, you might struggle to get to sleep with cold feet. This might be environmental, due to a very cold winter and cold floors, or physical, due to limited circulation.

Regardless, cold feet can be highly disruptive to your sleep process, especially when you first go to sleep. While both companies offer beds with temperature regulation, that regulation typically applies to the entire bed or at least your side, which means that if you have cold feet, it might raise the temperature across the entire mattress, leaving the rest of your body too warm.

With the Climate360 mattress from Sleep Number, there are gentle foot warmers on either side of the mattress to help you fall asleep faster. It gently warms your feet, without overheating the rest of you. 

Winner:

Sleep Number for their foot warming sensors. 

Issue #4: Falling Asleep

The Sleep Number beds have made a name for themselves by offering your individual sleep number, tied to the firmness of your mattress, but now they help you fall asleep by keeping the mattress cool. With so many different mattresses, the biggest mechanism behind helping you fall asleep is having something with the most appropriate firmness and with a cool temperature, the latter of which can only be achieved with one of their two most expensive beds: The ClimateCool or Climate360. Even then, the Climate360 is the only one that can adjust for warmth as well, but is limited to within 15° in either direction. 

According to their website, the Eight Sleep pod has been “clinically proven” to help you fall asleep 20% faster with the cover alone. How? You can set climate control for your body and your head with separate mattress and pillow covers, allowing different temperatures for your neck and head compared to the rest of your body.

They also have the built-in soundscapes. 

These come specifically with the base, so I will say that in order to utilize this function, you have to invest in the base, not just the cover and the pillow cover. The base projects the sounds through the integrated speaker system. The soundscapes were developed by Dr. Andrew Huberman with specific white noise that helps drown out any background noise and helps your body relax so that you fall asleep faster.

Winner:

Eight Sleep for their built-in soundscapes and temperature settings.

Issue #5: Staying Asleep

The technology behind the Sleep Number beds, like the Climate 360 smart bed, tracks your sleep quality and, from there, lets you see how well you slept throughout the night. In effect, this comes off, in my opinion, as a marketing ploy because you are given 100 free nights with the mattress before you have to commit to it. As such, it would make sense to show you how much more effectively you slept throughout that time frame to encourage your commitment.

The thing I don’t like, though, is that this data is viewable with your smart device, so you can only control your base if you buy the flex fit base, and review your sleep score through their proprietary app.

This is basically retroactive because it reflects on previous information which is juxtaposed by the technology in the Bluetooth connected hub from Eight Sleep which, yes, tracks your sleep in the app so that you can look at it the next day, with a sleep fitness score similar to Sleep Number, but that data is used in real time to make adjustments to the position of the base, the temperature, and the soundscapes. Plus, you’ve already purchased the Pod or at least the accessories, so it feels less like a marketing ploy. 

So what else does Eight Sleep offer to help you stay asleep?

Turns out, a lot. 

For starters, they have a gentle vibration and temperature change mixed with soothing sounds to replace your alarm. I for one love this as an alternative to a phone because having my phone right next to the bed is so disruptive, and even my basic alarm clock still projects light into the room. This takes away the need for either of those alarm systems and gently wakes you up by raising the temperature to something more comfortable and vibrating the bed so that you wake up, even without disturbing your partner. Separate alarms that don’t wake up the other person? Yes please!

The same data that is used to track your sleep will automatically make adjustments like the elevation and temperature throughout your sleep cycles. 

  • Elevation might, for example, adjust if you are reading in bed, and as your core temperature starts to drop, the Pod will lower the bed back down to sleep mode and start cooling your side of the bed. 
  • Once you get into a deep sleep cycle, as verified by your biometric data, it will keep your bed even cooler to support cellular recovery. 
  • If at any time it detects partner snoring or you’re snoring, it will quietly elevate that side of the bed. 
  • If at any time the room temperature changes, the Pod will make adjustments to keep optimal temperatures on your side of the bed accordingly. 
  • When your brain starts to become more active, the Pod will gently warm your body to support that activity, helping you wake up gently.

Bonus:

If you want it, you can use their real-time monitoring system included in the Pod to detect early signs of stress, monitoring your respiratory disturbances, heartbeat disturbances, resting heart rate, and other patterns over the span of several weeks without having to wear a physical device.

Summing Up

When I looked at Eight Sleep vs. Sleep Number, I was pretty unimpressed with Sleep Number (except where foot warming was concerned). This mostly stems from the fact that you can only realistically tackle one type of sleep issue per mattress design, so if you and your partner have very different sleep issues, you might not benefit from the same mattress, and if you suffer from more than one sleep issue, you might need two different mattresses at any given time. Plus, the only technology that comes close is the base, but that can’t be purchased separately.

Eight Sleep, by comparison, integrates a wide array of technology based on your key biometric data from either side of the bed to make real-time adjustments. Those adjustments apply to a range of sleep issues, making this a much more viable investment. Not only that, you can keep your existing mattress and purchase accessories separately to achieve similar effects.