In this episode, Cheryl interviews Michael Byrne, CEO of BIA Neuroscience about their new biofeedback sleep mask. Michael shares his background in psychology and how he got interested in sleep. He explains the connection between stress and sleep issues and the importance of accurate data collection for neurofeedback.

The sleep mask uses conduction drivers to provide audio stimulation to encourage the brain to enter desired sleep stages. The mask also mimics sunlight to wake users up gently and offers features like meditation and affirmations. The wake up experience Michael describes is amazing and we’re looking forward to sharing more about it when it finally arrives!

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This article is a great resource for more better sleep tips and strategies.

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Takeaways:

• 
  
• Stress is a major factor impacting sleep, and accurate data collection is crucial for effective neurofeedback.
  
• The sleep mask uses conduction drivers to provide audio stimulation and encourage the brain to enter desired sleep stages.
  
• The mask mimics sunlight to wake users up gently and offers features like meditation and affirmations.
  

Watch on YouTube:

Episode Transcript:

Cheryl McColgan (00:01.068)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal and Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Michael Byrne and he is with BIA Neuroscience. And just me saying the word neuroscience, know that that’s one of my things just to remind you about my previous content. I have a background in psychology and actually went to graduate school for a bit for clinical neuropsychology. So the brain is definitely something I’m always interested in. So I’m excited for you to share more about your company today. Michael, welcome. before we…

get into all that and how this is going to help people with sleep, which is another one of my favorite topics. I’d love for you to just share how is it you got interested in this kind of work and kind of what inspired you to, you know, make a sleep product? Were you having personal trouble with sleep? Like what’s the scoop?

Michael (00:44.354)
I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I’ll give a long -winded story and edit it as you feel. I went into biopsychology myself. I was very interested in the why behind people’s behavior. Why do we do anything? And originally that led me to psychology. And then more I studied it, more I realized the brain was behind it. So I went towards biopsychology. And I ended up doing an internship with a group in paranoid schizophrenia.

Cheryl McColgan (00:51.84)
you

Michael (01:14.38)
Very quickly learned studying and working are two vastly different things in the field of psychology. So, you know, I was expecting something like a little bit more exciting and fast pace. And instead it’s really quite upsetting and requires a significant amount of empathy and, you know, emotional backing behind it that can be quite draining. So I decided to just get into the working world and see what I liked. So I ended up getting a position at a neurofeedback clinic.

I became a certified neurofeedback technician and just saw everything under the sun. And one of the things I noticed and one of the things that we emphasize every single time was when someone came in for a session, we asked them, how was your sleep? And big reason why we did that is it’s a more objective way to get an understanding of someone’s current cognitive state, so to speak. When you ask someone who’s, for example, going through depression and you ask them, how are you doing today?

it’s one a negative trigger and two you might not get as direct of a response in terms of their current state of mind then if you ask something along the lines of how was your sleep? How was your energy? How are you feeling? It gets you a bit more of a rounded understanding and we asked that no matter the reason someone came in to the neurofeedback clinic so that was kind of my first touch point on the sleep side.

ended up moving on to a sleep supplement company. So that’s where I met my co -founder. My co -founder was the very first hire there. I was the second hire. He was handling everything front end of the business. I was handling everything back end of the business. So we kind of got to grow that together. And we were selling a natural sleep aid, just a health supplement, little bit melatonin, lemon balm, chamomile, so on and so forth. That we did quite well. We were selling over 500 bottles a day, you know, over a million customer who serves and

We got to see a ton of feedback and understand the issues around sleep in a much more holistic manner. We both ended up moving on, wanted to keep working together. I wanted to get back into neurotech. His background is actually IBM software. So he was looking to get back into that side. So we started researching the neurotech space in general and surveyed thousands of people, went through hundreds of companies and analysis and ended up actually right back at.

Michael (03:35.36)
sleep as the most opportune area for us to build and work towards and sleep and neurofeedback actually. it’s kind of a came full circle for us there.

Cheryl McColgan (03:49.492)
Yeah, that’s a great backstory because I find that there’s so many, generally, I feel like people making products of this type that are in, a lot of them that are in the health and wellness space, they like genuinely see an issue or a problem that’s not being addressed and they wanna help people. And so I always think it’s great to have that background because it’s like a lot of companies are a lot of these kinds of things that really help people. It’s not something that might make them a million dollars. Like for example, this is what I bought from one of my,

previous guest, it’s like a, I’m not going to say it right, but it’s a neuro stimulation kind of thing that you work with with your feet that helps you with your balance and proprioception and stuff like that. I mean, this little ball is probably not going to make her million dollars, but it’s serving an amazing purpose. And I think that this sleep mask that you guys have created is going to do the same thing. And, you know, I think first to say people also know how focused I am on sleep. think it’s one of the most

underappreciated aspects of your health. So when you were working in these clinics and hearing about people’s problems with sleep, what was it that you were hearing that made you realize, okay, I think there’s a way to connect this to neurofeedback. And then also, was there like a common theme, like people just weren’t getting enough sleep, enough restorative sleep, like just maybe talk a little bit about what you were seeing that led you to this product.

Michael (05:06.38)
Yeah, so I’ll kind of separate the two in terms of like the consistency of issues and then how neurofeedback connects to that. So on the sleep side, what I saw a lot of was generally speaking, the impact of stress. That was like by far the number one impact on sleep, where even it was falling asleep, waking up frequently, not getting enough of that deep restorative sleep.

that seemed to be like the number one connection was how stressed people were. There was everything under the sun. It does generally impact women more. The more you dig into it, the more you see that things are in many cases getting worse. So for one amazing finding was the number of people that are sleep deprived, getting six hours or less of sleep is four times, I believe it’s four times as high as it was

in the middle of World War II. So the problem has gotten worse. It’s a lot of over -stimulation. Our brains are just firing a mile a minute and being able to shut it off is very important. So that kind of brings me to the neurofeedback piece. So essentially what you’re doing with neurofeedback is you look at where the brain currently is, you look at where it wants to go, and then you provide some sort of simulation, audio, light, haptic, it all varies. We focus

mainly on audio, to guide you towards that desired state. It’s a lot more complicated when you’re looking at something like, let’s say, a concussion. One, it has a wider range of how that looks when it’s in its current state, and two, what that desired state is a lot more personalized. A big reason why we looked at neurofeedback for sleep is that sleep is, generally speaking, standard across, like in terms of what the brain looks like, like sleep stage one for me and sleep stage one for you.

are quite similar. determining what that desired state actually looks like and getting to it is quite similar person to person. How long you need to spend in that stage and how many cycles would have you, that is also incredibly personalized and unique to each individual. But in terms of the brain patterns of stage one, stage two, the four different stages, depending on three, depending on who you ask that you cycle through are generally speaking the same person to person.

Michael (07:31.65)
So that makes the neurofeedback guidance a lot simpler because it’s generally speaking guiding towards the same goal.

Cheryl McColgan (07:40.052)
Yeah, that makes sense. so then the tech of it, you’re saying that there definitely sleep is very individualized in some ways, but there are these stages that are consistent from person to person. Is that consistency in the stages enough to have this mirror feedback work on the person or is it a type of product where it might learn more about your personal needs as it goes on?

Michael (08:02.59)
Perfect. That’s exactly one of the things that I’m extremely happy with this product. another issue when we saw selling the sleep supplements is that it would work great for a few months and then it fade. Typically it was like six to seven weeks where we’d start to see a fade off for people. And we saw that when we started researching other sleep products as well. And generally speaking, you need a product that learns, individualizes, and grows with you. So our product personalizes to your needs. look at the general

processes that we work with you to set your sleep goals. So if you wake up 10 times a night, okay, by the end of the month, let’s get you to waking up eight times a night, just something progress forward, but we’re going to continue to work with you month over month and individualize and get better. So based on that, we look at data that you collect. We, make it, we have a super easy journaling process. We can see what’s impacting your sleep. And then we also can see how you’re responding to the neurofeedback and we adapt both of those things. So we provide insights on how to improve your.

day -to -day activities and your actions that impact your sleep, as well as we personalize and individualize your neurofeedback algorithm to your unique needs. And then work with you to improve those goals. personalization is definitely, in my eyes, absolutely vital to a sustained sleep improvement product.

Cheryl McColgan (09:20.48)
And so that’s the app -based part of it. So I’m assuming over time that adapts and talk about AI and stuff these days, run some kind of algorithm that figures these things out to adjust it properly for you. So there’s not a whole lot that people have to do with that side of it other than wear this mask at night and then you said there’s some simple journaling that you have to do. Can you maybe describe that part of it a little bit more? What kind of data are you collecting?

Michael (09:29.314)
Yes.

Cheryl McColgan (09:49.394)
as far as what people have to log.

Michael (09:49.645)
Yeah.

Yeah, so goals we do, generally speaking, we keep things as optional as possible. It’s better. The more info we have, the more we can personalize and improve. The objective would be to have a before and after scientifically validated psychometric to see, you improving outside of the data we collect? Outside of, did your heart rate variability improve? What were the psychometrics? What are the things that matter to you?

falling asleep faster, there’s scientifically validated studies we can use, surveys that we can use to do a before and after and see if you improved and what matters most to you. So there’s that aspect. And then there’s like super simple tagging, know, caffeine, it’s kind of like a one to five scale. It’s not like how many coffees and when did you like, it’s just slide the scale, how much caffeine did you have compared to normal? When did you exercise and how vigorous it was? We want to make it super simple. You can use like previously Sage one, so it’s

one click to fill in five, six responses. We want to keep it as simple as possible for filling that out. And then the other piece there is what are we measuring? What does that data look like? So we have four different sensors in there, well, technically five. Our key sensor is called FNIRS. So what it’s doing is measuring brain activity. So we measure where it matters, sleep happens in the brain.

That’s where we want to measure. So what it’s looking at is the amount of oxygen your blood is carrying to your brain. And it’s more, it’s more akin to like fMRI where it’s looking at blood flow and activity within the brain. we’re looking at blood flow to your brain and that is correlated to sleep stages. So based on how much oxygenation and what that pattern is like, we can get a determination of sleep stage. With that, we also get breathing rate, heart rate variability, heart rate, a handful of other metrics. But that’s our kind of key.

Michael (11:48.648)
sensor that we have in the product. Then we have other ones that you see in standard wearables. like IMU, so like movement and head positioning, we’re able to capture that activity. We have a temperature sensor. we’re working hard on this one. Definitely follow us along if you’re looking for a wearable that can measure temperature to two decimal places, cause most can’t do that right now. And it’s definitely incredibly important for, for women’s health. We’re working on that as well as getting it to two decimal places.

And then we have our fourth sensor is a binary microphone. Collecting eight hours of actual audio is just way too much data to store. And we operate Bluetooth free as well. You can enable it if you want, but we are completely Bluetooth and signal free. All the data is stored on device. So it just measures more or less decibel levels. And that can tell us if there’s patterns with it, we can detect something like snoring. If there was like a loud jump in it, we can be like, okay, whatever.

Cheryl McColgan (12:26.743)
I guess.

Michael (12:46.862)
your neighbor slam the door or card, card honk, whatever it is. So we can start to connect those two disturbances in your sleep and we can make that connection and overlap. The fifth sensor is just a light sensor in the mask. So we know if you’re wearing it properly and if it’s getting 100 % blackout. So we combine all that data to get sleep staging as well.

Cheryl McColgan (13:08.702)
Yeah, and because you brought up other wearables, so I have my wearable, everybody has all their wearables now, right? Would you say that the proximity to the brain in your head during sleep has any other either benefits or challenges versus something you’re wearing on your wrist or your finger or anything like that? I’m curious about that kind of part. Does it make it more accurate in some way or is it more challenging for the tech?

Michael (13:36.206)
Challenges, 100%, going through this, making a product around the head. There’s a lot more safety regulations, just generally speaking, for you to work with, even if you’re just a general wellness product. What qualifies for safety is much, higher. The other side is most people don’t wear things on their head. are, you know, wrist watches are very common. It’s very comfortable, so wear rings.

Most people don’t wear things on their head. It’s why we’re doing a sleep mask It’s something people are already familiar with the other benefit with that is that actually blocks out light which also helps you sleep But yeah, so just the form factor itself is more difficult the benefit is definitely like if you look at any studies on the accuracy of a Wrist wearable or a ring based one. It’s almost always compared to a headset for the brain

like some sort of neural headset. That’s how they determine the accuracy is how does it compare to measuring things from the brain. So it’s by far the standard to follow. So you get way more accurate data and sorry to ramble, just neurofeedback, the basis of good neurofeedback is good data collection. Cause if we’re not understanding where your sleep stage currently is and where you currently are, the feedback we provide to get you to that desired state is not going to be accurate. So accurate data means accurate feedback.

Inaccurate data means inaccurate feedback and ineffective product. So it’s really important to get that high quality data and the high quality input from the beginning.

Cheryl McColgan (15:12.116)
Yeah, and this might be slightly in the weeds, but I think it’s a little, I think it is kind of important because one thing I’ve observed with different wearables, even my, also have a sleep number bed, which is a bed that has like an air mattress and even it has something that detects, you know, how long you’re in bed or how long are you in your sleep stages and this sort of thing. So from what I’ve read in the past about these is that things like HRV or whatever it is, there’s a lot of different ways to choose what algorithms you’re using or how it’s going to actually calculate.

those numbers. So a lot of them, what you get on your ring or your watch or your bed or whatever it is, won’t be the same. And so guess my question to you as a person who’s developing the technology is what factors did you use to kind of decide what how you were going to calculate this data and how that’s like matching up with maybe studies that you’ve read about it and that sort of thing.

Michael (16:05.4)
Yeah, a lot of it does come down to the method of collection. With us, an important factor is because our tech is all completely contactless. All you feel is the soft inner textile and foam. Everything is either infrared light or it doesn’t require immediate skin contact. We had to factor in the distance between where the sensor is and where it’s collecting the data from. And we’ve had to engineer around that quite a bit. It’s been a pretty significant challenge.

to go completely contactless. With something like a wrist wearable, it has that direct skin contact. So temperature sensors, for example, much easier for them to be able to collect that much more affordable component as well, because they have that direct contact. It’s substantially easier. But generally speaking, you kind of have to look at what the studies are out there currently. What have they found in terms of what is accurate and what isn’t?

algorithms and processes, a lot of this stuff is actually open source. A scientific community is generally speaking supportive and trying to help each other out. So you can find quite a bit of data out there. And then of course, we’ve got a couple partnerships coming up with universities to conduct studies and further validate as well as further improve because as you’re saying, it’s algorithmic based. So the benefit is even if if you’ve got the hardware down pat, the current

Sleep staging could be a little bit inaccurate. And the more you study and research it, the more data you collect, the better that can get.

Cheryl McColgan (17:34.836)
Yeah, very cool. I think it’s interesting too that it seems that you, I mean, you definitely have everything to a certain level right now. But one thing that’s interesting is that you’re still in pretty early stages because these units are not shipping yet. And so what has that process been like? it, you know, did you run into some things along the way that like, well, this is taking a little longer than we thought, or it’s taking shorter than we thought. I mean, I’m sure it’s really interesting developing a product from the ground up, and especially one

that has these technical challenges that you’ve decided, but I think that you described, but I think it’s really neat because, you obviously, like you said, you have it in the proximity of the place where it’s gonna be more accurate in that way, but then you have this challenge of not putting sensors on people, which I think is really interesting. So anyway, all that is to say, I appreciate the tech behind it, which is really cool. What’s been like the biggest thing is what you mentioned with…

the lack of sensors being in contact with the skin, one of the major ones, or were there other things that came up too?

Michael (18:35.404)
So there’s that aspect of it. And then generally speaking, the form factor, building a mask, there’s so much variability in head shapes and sizes. And because of that, you need variation in softness. tech inside a sleep mask does also make it far more complicated because we need to get precision to a millimeter accuracy in manufacturing. And we’re doing that with foam and textile.

Textiles are a little bit easier, but we’re now going to stitch and cut tiny little holes. But getting the foam to expand into that exact shape is incredibly difficult. It’s not just as easy as just cutting a hole out. That has been incredibly difficult, getting that level of precision to a millimeter, while also working with something like foam, where they pre -print this in sheets of length of a football field. And we’re getting this much that in terms of manufacturers and businesses,

We are not a $10 product, so we’re not selling this in massive volumes in terms of the foam. To justify the business with them is also a difficult process. To find manufacturers willing to work with smaller quantity on the foam side has been a challenge, with that being absolutely vital to getting that blackout experience, to getting the contactless. FNIRs, you don’t want any external light interference, so it’s to our benefit to make sure the mask is 100 % blackout because it improves our sensor accuracy.

With that being said, need to, again, know, neurofeedback the quality of data coming in is the quality of output going out. So we need to make sure we had that a hundred percent blackout, no matter the head shape. And that just took a ton of R &D, ton of research, ton of iterations. And we thought we had it nailed and it didn’t work out. We thought it had nailed again, didn’t work out. So we’re finally at that stage where that part seems to be resolved. It’s now actually being able to scale this and build it for mass manufacturing to meeting the quality standards we have.

very tasteful standards.

Cheryl McColgan (20:34.944)
Yeah, and that’s what I love that you guys are so committed to getting this just right and to making sure that you’re going to market with a product that works amazing, the tech is there. That’s why I kind of want to go into that a little bit, just because that’s not something I think people think of very often. But what you’re trying to achieve with this, I think will be really special and really valuable to people. So to go back just to the tech a little bit, you said you do it primarily with audio.

So can you describe the experience people get when they put on the mask and it’s well fitting and it’s got the nice foam and there’s no sensors on there or anything like that. So they put on this mask. And by the way, I’ve used a sleep mask for a long time. really is the whole full blackout is really important to sleep. So I think that on top of what you’re doing with the neurofeedback is also amazing. But I would love to hear more just about the experience of put on the mask, what are the sounds, what are the things. One thing I also wanted to clarify for people

you mentioned the Bluetooth. So that’s related to EMF, which EMF is something that you don’t want to be, you want it as much out of your life as possible, right? And so when you especially when you have things right on your head. So I think that’s really important. And I just wanted to kind of call that out again. But so anyway, back to the experience of the mask and the sound.

Michael (21:49.114)
Yes, and let me know if I’m going off track here at all. So one of the things that we discovered accidentally was the sound quality and the experience. We didn’t want any hard parts over the ears. We’ve tried a handful of sleep masks and the speakers over the ears, just killed the cartilage in my ears. My ears would wake up, they’d be super sore. There’s one, you know, I tried like a cheaper one, it was sore for like five days afterwards. It’s a terrible experience. So we use something called conduction driver.

So conduction drivers work through contact. So we skip the ear canal and it vibrates through the bones and straight to the inner ear to create the music experience and what you hear. The benefit to that is there’s no hard parts over your ears. All of our electronics sit around your eyes. And the unexpected benefit is that it was just incredibly soothing. You put on the mask.

the audio starts and you just fall into your chair. It’s incredibly relaxing. And we found out afterwards, they use it with, you know, veterans with PTSD, like conduction drivers or, children with autism to help stimulate the vagus nerve, help them calm down and relax. So that was an unintended benefit of avoiding tech over the years. the audio itself, we’re going to have a handful of different tracks. We’ll have things like

Ocean waves crashing, we’ll have things like white noise, we’ll have things like, my personal favorite is the piano. And then behind it all, there’s kind of like an ambient music that was designed by neuroscientists that mimics these stages. So there’s…

Cheryl McColgan (23:28.192)
Is that like a binaural beats sort of idea or is it something different?

Michael (23:31.822)
It’s similar. So, binaural beats tends to emulate a specific Hertz in your brain. The music we use emulates the entire sleep stage. know, if binaural beats is targeting 10 Hertz, stage two sleep, just for argument’s sake, is going to be predominantly 10 Hertz range, but it’s also going to have some other aspects to it and other Hertz ranges. Our music hits that entire spectrum of that sound scale. So, it’s mimicking it. It’s like…

seeing the full sunset instead of just seeing a hint of yellow. You get to see all the colors. We’re doing the same thing with our music. So that’s a neuromusic portion. And then there’s a neurofeedback portion. So you put on the mask, the music starts, and then there’s kind of an encouragement and discouragement track. So those are there to teach your brain when it’s starting to go towards a more relaxed state, go towards that sleep stage, or when it’s moving away from it. And this is all passive. It doesn’t require active engagement.

your brain will just start to make these associations across time. So that once it starts to hear that encouragement, it’s going to fall asleep faster, it’s going to stay asleep. And when it hears the discouragement, it also knows, okay, I’m going in the wrong direction and get it to switch gears.

Cheryl McColgan (24:44.992)
And this is, so since this is neurofeedback, it’s kind of encouraging your brain to do these specific stages. So let’s say you’re a person right now that is getting 30 minutes of deep sleep at night, which is, would be very poor and not good for your health. And they’re relating this to so many things now, Alzheimer’s, your brain, the glymphatic system at night cleans your brain of these plaques and tangles that they think are related to dementia. So there’s, there’s a lot going on when you sleep that’s really healthy if you’re getting to those stages.

So guess my question is if say you’re a person that’s say right now getting 30 minutes of deep, like how does that work? Is the sound programmed to get sort of an optimal amount, two hours of deep sleep, or does it again just learn based on where you’re starting now and it starts to increase you, something like that.

Michael (25:29.43)
Yeah, generally speaking, we’ll work towards the generic eight hour window to start just to be safe, but it’s going to learn and adapt to your needs. So in the morning when you wake up, there is two pieces. There’s a video game we’ve made with a game designer that objectively tells us how alert you actually are. So we don’t necessarily focus on the number of minutes of deep sleep or minutes of RAM or how many wakeups that you have. How alert are you in the morning to be able to function?

throughout the day. Like that’s our number one objective, get you to be at your very best. And then there’s a second piece of just one to 10, how much energy do you feel? And that helps train the algorithm of what is a good night’s sleep for you versus a bad night’s sleep. And again, same thing, the more you do it, the more you use it, the better it’s going to learn and better it’s going to be able to adapt. And I’ll start to be able to correlate that info to exercising in the afternoon versus evening, for example, and it’s going to start to make those connections to what is best for you as an individual.

but it’s gonna start with a more generic window as to, know, example, I might need two and a half hours of deep sleep after a day of exercise compared to someone who might need only an hour. It’s gonna vary individually. So it learns and adapts to that. And then throughout the night, that neural music, the neurofeedback will continue to work. So when you get towards that deep sleep, and I know in this instance, it’s two and a half hours and I slept amazing, it was…

fully recovered the next day, it’s gonna encourage me to stay into that deep sleep for longer so I can get towards that two and a half hour time frame.

Cheryl McColgan (27:03.198)
Awesome, I love that it individualizes like that and that it somehow is able to improve that over time or change that or if it gets you to an optimal level, then it may just stay at that same thing. It’s not gonna push you to like you’re getting eight hours of sleep, because that’s just not possible or that wouldn’t be healthy either. So one of the stats and I think I just wanted to call this out because one of the stats I read on your website was something to the effect that you could get up to

Michael (27:18.03)
Yeah, exactly.

Cheryl McColgan (27:30.836)
double the amount of deep sleep? I remembering that correctly? Any other, as you’ve been testing this and learning more about it, and I’m assuming you’re probably using this every night yourself, are there any things that you’re noticing personally or that you’ve seen validated throughout your testing that are some improvements besides the deep sleep that people might be interested in?

Michael (27:34.413)
Yeah.

Michael (27:52.494)
The main thing is going to be the boost in energy. The wake up experience, I think on its own is going to be incredibly valuable and we can talk about that in a bit, waking up and feeling actually ready to take on your day compared to waking up and contemplating, should I hit snooze? Should I not? I know it’s not healthy, but I’m going to hit snooze. Then you wake up again 10 minutes later and then you go and get your coffee. You kind of drag yourself out of bed and it takes you a couple hours to get going.

It’s a vastly different experience to your day to wake up and feel good and ready to move. It sets your mood for the rest of your day. And I think that would be, to me, the bigger thing. We talk about deep sleep simply because it’s something people can understand and they know it’s important and almost everyone’s lacking in deep sleep. So it’s an easy way to describe that, but the energy experience is by far gonna be the best benefit.

Cheryl McColgan (28:49.15)
And then what about things like sleep duration or REM sleep or things that people, think, you you’re saying, of course, that wake up experience, that would be amazing to wake up like that every day, first of all, because I don’t, I definitely don’t have that myself. But those other aspects of health and that people are hearing about duration or what improvements or what changes have you seen in those areas?

Michael (29:12.998)
That we see as very subjective person to person So I wouldn’t necessarily both specific stats of whatever adding an extra hour of sleep or anything I wouldn’t necessarily focus on any of that. I would be much more heavily focused on Did you get the right amount of sleep for you?

Cheryl McColgan (29:32.414)
Yes. then do you also, and this is just, so maybe you wake up feeling pretty ready to take on the day and like you slept pretty well, but then maybe you have afternoon fatigue or you have, you’re just like really tired and it’s hard for you to make it until the end of your day. Are those some things that are being factored in as well where you can say, yeah, I woke up amazing, but then I don’t know if something still happened where I don’t feel like I’m optimized.

Michael (29:57.23)
Yeah, 100%. There’s a aspect of it where we look at your chronotype and we look at your behaviors matching to your chronotype. So are you acting in a way that matches your energy schedule? And then if it’s something, you do shift work, not really your choice, we’ll work with you around that. And we’ll also provide advice on that. But we’re going to work with you to deal with whatever your circumstances. With that, we have an energy forecast. So we look at

where you are now and we kind of forecast where your energy peak is going to be during the day when it might come slow. And of course we have a nap mode with it as well to give you kind of that optimal 20, 30 minute nap to get you back onto your feet.

Cheryl McColgan (30:40.672)
Okay, that is very cool because here’s my challenges. First of all, I did have a bad bout with insomnia years ago. And so as a result of that, now I don’t care how tired I am, I will not nap because I just have this fear ingrained of taking a nap and then I don’t sleep well that night and then it becomes this horrible cycle. But I do think there are times where naps are very valuable. There’s a lot of research on that. But there’s this optimal nap time that they say is, I believe it’s 20 to 30 minutes.

But my challenge with that has always been, okay, I lay down, it takes me a while to settle. I’m like exhausted, but it takes me a while to settle down. And then I finally fall asleep. But if I set an alarm, how long do I set it for? It’s just this whole thing. I would really, what I’m imagining happens, you put on the mask and then it kind of, you know, gently wakes you up at the appropriate time. Or can you describe that experience?

Michael (31:21.28)
Yes.

Michael (31:31.018)
Yeah, so I’ll talk about the nap and I’ll talk about the wake up experience because I love the wake up experience. So on the nap side, the objective there is to make sure you don’t get into that deep sleep. And then when you get in that deep sleep during a nap and you wake up, you wake up groggy, you kind of throw your system into a loop. We try to actually encourage, you know, not going past stage one or stage two, get you to relax as fast as possible, get you relaxed, get you calm, and then keep you at that stage one, stage two sleep, sleep component for the nap.

The wake -up experience we have a handful of different things. So there’s a smart alarm So outside the nap it’s easier to talk about this in terms of a full night’s sleep, but there’s a smart alarm so if you set it for Whatever 7 a Just for argument’s sake around 630 will have the tiniest cue of light for your brain to start to wake up nothing like it’s almost Wouldn’t register consciously

and it slowly increases in brightness, the music changes to go towards a wake up state. So instead of encouraging you to sleep at that point, the music’s actually gonna change and it’s gonna encourage you to wake up. So you kind of wake up in that optimal state. And then as you approach that 7 a timeframe, make sure you don’t sleep past that, the lights will come on and it actually mimics sunlight. it’s tons of people talk about the importance of getting sunlight first thing in the morning. It’s very well researched.

we’re able to mimic that directly in the sleep mask. So we worked with several optical engineers to mimic that sunrise experience directly inside the mask. With that as well, we’re working on a like auto meditate from there. So without moving the muscle, you can start to meditate first thing in the morning. You get that 10 minutes of sunlight, you get some meditation. You can have affirmations going. that same thing, the first thing you hear in the morning is so important.

And instead of seeing an email from your boss telling you how you’re late on a project, you hear some positive news, you hear some affirmations to start your day. It’s a way better way to wake up and set the mood.

Cheryl McColgan (33:37.054)
I can see why you’re super excited about that because that is quite often what I do is like once I’m actually fully awake is I take a couple more minutes right then to meditate, which is it’s so interesting because I was a yoga teacher. I don’t teach publicly anymore, but for many years in a practice for many years and so meditation, of course, the big part of that and what I find is, you know, people have this block against so I have to sit this certain way. I to sit on floor cross later, whatever. I’m like, no, you can like literally lay down and meditate and I think it takes a lot of the

Michael (34:02.701)
in the

Cheryl McColgan (34:06.73)
you know, the barriers to meditation away. So even better is if you’ve woken up nicely, you’re actually refreshed in your body and you can take those few minutes to settle into a meditation before you get, and I mean, this, might be my favorite part of this product. didn’t even read about this yet. So I love it. It’s amazing. well, everybody can see like, I’m super excited about it. I can’t wait to get it. And that’s why I reached it out to you and was like, my God, this is so cool.

Michael (34:20.63)
Yes.

Cheryl McColgan (34:33.29)
But Michael, we have a little bit of a wait. This is gonna come out and it’s gonna come out though at kind of the perfect time. If you know somebody in your life that doesn’t sleep well or I mean, who couldn’t use this product really? So it is orderable right now and it is an orderable at an amazing discount. And I’ll let you kind of describe that includes a lifetime subscription to the software, all this kind of stuff. But it actually won’t ship until sometime next year. So maybe you can talk about that a little bit now.

Michael (34:36.035)
Yes.

Michael (35:00.876)
Yeah, so I’ll get the bad part out of the way. It’s shipping mid next year. The current price is quite a bit lower than we anticipate when we get to launch. You’re looking at a hundred bucks cheaper if you were to order now. And to me, the big thing is a lifetime subscription. There are a handful of other wearables there where you pay a monthly subscription for access to your data. The way we focus on the subscription is providing continuous value to you. And for us, that’s improving the personalization AI.

that’s improving the insights aspect, but it’s also new feature releases. So, you know, there’s gonna be new meditation tracks, new audio tracks, but there’s also gonna be things like snoring interruption. One thing I’m really excited about that we’re working towards, it’s gonna take some time, won’t come out at launch, it’ll take a little bit, but nightmare interruption and being able to detect that interrupted. So there’ll be a handful of features constantly released every year. And that’s where that subscription would come in. If you pre -order now, you get that

subscription for free for life. It’s not for the product if the product dies You need to start paying the subscription. It’s going to follow your account everywhere you go So for the rest of your life you get that lifetime subscription

Cheryl McColgan (36:12.724)
Yeah, and that’s one of the major reasons I wanted to lock it in. So mine’s already ordered and I can’t wait. And so if you’re hearing this and you’re like me and you think this amazing or you want to get it for somebody Christmas, go to heelnourishgrow .com slash BIA, B -I -A. And that will take you there. You can read all about the tech we’ve discussed. You can read more, but I don’t know what else there is say about it. mean, after hearing, if I heard this, I would be like, what? I gotta get this. So Michael, any…

final thoughts you’d like to leave people with before we move on with our days here, anything that we didn’t cover or just any final words.

Michael (36:47.618)
I guess the main thing is I handle, yeah, the product’s amazing. I absolutely cannot wait to get this out in everyone’s hands. We know it’s a bit of a wait, but it is gonna be worth the wait. The one other thing is I handle all the customer service directly. So if you have any questions, email, I’ll be the one to respond. It’s not gonna be someone who doesn’t know anything about it. It’s me personally that will handle that email or handle that message on Instagram or Facebook. So happy to…

clear any further questions, reach out. We know it’s a complicated product. We know there’s questions and we don’t want you placing the pre -order without feeling 100 % excited about getting it mid next year.

Cheryl McColgan (37:29.898)
Yeah, and so which one of those ways is the most effective to reach out to you? Would you recommend that they go to the website or to reach out to you? You mentioned Instagram, like what’s the best or will any of those work?

Michael (37:39.886)
Any of them will work. It doesn’t matter. I handle them all.

Cheryl McColgan (37:43.784)
Okay, awesome. Well, Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to do this today. And like I said, I’m super excited about it. And I hope when people hear this that they will get excited about too and get better sleep. So thanks again for joining us.

Michael (37:55.65)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.