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Eight Sleep's Alexandra Zatarian Turns Sleep into a Competitive Sport

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  Published in Sports and Competition on Monday, September 29th 2025 at 7:12 GMT by Newsweek
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From Bed to Battlefield: How a 17‑Year‑Old Is Turning Sleep Into Competitive Sport

When most teenagers dream of high school football, gymnastics, or the latest TikTok trend, Alexandra Zatarian is quietly rewiring the very concept of competition: she’s turning sleep itself into a sport. At 17, the New York‑area student has already built a community of friends, classmates and sleep‑obsessed influencers who track, tweak and triumph over the nightly hours they spend in bed. And the catalyst? A sleek, sensor‑laden mattress from Eight Sleep—a startup that claims to “turn your sleep into a science experiment” and has taken the fitness world by storm.

The Genesis of a New Competition

Zatarian first stumbled upon the idea while researching how sleep affects athletic performance for a science project. “I was reading about how athletes use sleep protocols to fine‑tune their training,” she told Newsweek. “It struck me that, if you could quantify sleep, you could turn it into a measurable competition.” She began by enrolling her friends in a “Sleep Challenge” that tracked the same metrics—total hours, REM cycles, heart‑rate variability, even mattress temperature—using the Eight Sleep app. The leaderboard was surprisingly popular, and soon the challenge extended to local high‑school sports teams, who wanted to see whether better sleep translated into better game day performance.

The idea exploded on Instagram. Followers began sharing their own “Sleep Logs” with hashtags like #SleepOlympics and #RiseAndGrind, encouraging a culture where “sleep wins” became as celebrated as a championship trophy. Zatarian even coined the term “somnolence sport,” a tongue‑in‑cheek reference that caught the attention of several tech‑and‑health podcasts.

The Eight Sleep Advantage

The Eight Sleep mattress is not a simple, off‑the‑shelf product. According to the brand’s website (https://www.eightsleep.com), the mattress features a built‑in “Adaptive Temperature Control” system that can keep the sleeping surface between 60 °F and 86 °F (15–30 °C) while monitoring sleep stages in real time. Sensors embedded in the mattress track movement, heart rate, respiratory rate, and skin temperature, feeding data to a companion app that translates raw numbers into actionable insights—such as the optimal bedtime, best pillow height, or even a “sleep‑performance score.”

Zatarian describes the experience as “like having a coach that knows exactly when you’re in deep sleep and when you’re slipping into light rest.” The app’s data visualization tools allow users to see, over weeks, how changes to their environment—like adding blackout curtains or using a weighted blanket—affect their sleep architecture. The result is a data‑driven platform that encourages continuous improvement, a hallmark of any competitive sport.

The Science Behind the Sleep Competition

Zatarian’s endeavor is backed by a growing body of research linking sleep quality to athletic performance. A recent review published in Sleep Medicine Clinics (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsmc.2024.01.006) highlights how sleep debt and irregular sleep schedules can impair reaction time, muscle recovery, and even metabolic health. The article notes that athletes who consistently achieve 7–9 hours of high‑quality sleep tend to exhibit superior performance metrics compared to their peers with fragmented sleep.

Experts like Dr. Matthew Walker—author of Why We Sleep—also emphasize the role of slow‑wave sleep in growth hormone secretion and tissue repair. “You can’t out‑train a sleep‑deprived body,” Walker explains. “In a competitive setting, the margins are razor‑thin; sleep can be the deciding factor.” These findings provide the scientific underpinning for Zatarian’s sleep leaderboard: the metrics she and her peers track aren’t arbitrary; they correspond to tangible physiological benefits.

Expanding the Community

Beyond the local high school, Zatarian’s initiative has attracted attention from universities and professional teams. A sophomore at Stanford University’s engineering department is currently using the Eight Sleep platform to benchmark her own sleep against teammates playing NCAA basketball. Meanwhile, a semi‑professional soccer club in Boston has launched a “Sleep Academy” that offers workshops on sleep hygiene and personalized coaching based on Eight Sleep data.

The competition format has also been adapted for different demographics. A “Senior Sleep League” in a New Jersey retirement community encourages older adults to optimize their sleep, citing research that highlights the importance of sleep quality in mitigating age‑related decline. Even the city’s youth soccer league has incorporated a “Bedtime Bench” where children are scored on how consistent they are with pre‑game sleep routines.

Challenges and Ethical Considerations

Turning a basic biological necessity into a competitive sport raises several questions. Critics worry about pressure, especially among younger participants, to chase perfect sleep metrics and the potential for unhealthy obsession. Zatarian acknowledges this, emphasizing that the goal is “health, not perfection.” She and her mentors have built a “well‑being clause” into the challenge that discourages over‑monitoring and encourages users to prioritize mental health.

Another concern is data privacy. Eight Sleep’s privacy policy—available on their website—claims that all sleep data is encrypted and that users control who can see their metrics. Nonetheless, privacy advocates urge caution, reminding users that biometric data can reveal more than just sleep patterns, including mental health indicators.

The Road Ahead

With over 1 million mattresses sold and partnerships with Fortune‑500 brands, Eight Sleep is poised to become the mainstream platform for sleep optimization. Zatarian’s grassroots initiative may evolve into a formal “Sleep Olympics” featuring categories like “Longest Continuous REM” or “Fastest Sleep Latency.” Already, a group of high‑school athletes has proposed a national championship, complete with trophies and sponsorships.

“It’s a game of endurance, strategy, and science,” Zatarian says. “When you have a sleep coach, you can fine‑tune your performance in ways you never thought possible.” Whether the world will crown a new champion of the night remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: sleep is no longer a passive backdrop to our lives—it’s a stage where data, discipline, and determination collide.