Sleep Window
by Strong Mornings See our plans

How the plan works

The Sleep Window Plan is habit coaching, not medical treatment. It uses habits that sleep researchers have described for decades: one fixed wake time, a sleep window that matches the sleep you actually get, and keeping the bed for sleep.

Your numbers

Time in bed is your wake time minus your bed time. Time asleep is time in bed minus the minutes it takes to fall asleep and the minutes awake in the night. Sleep debt is 7 hours, the least adults need, minus your time asleep, times 7 nights. Your starting window is your time asleep plus 30 minutes, never under 6 hours. Once your diary has a week of nights, the window is reset from them; when most nights are 85% or more asleep, it widens by 15 minutes.

Who does what

We're product designers and engineers. We wrote the plan's 42 steps and the maths from the sources below, and built the app that runs them. The wind-down audio is read by a synthetic voice (OpenAI text-to-speech) from scripts we wrote; we used AI tools to help draft and check the text, and every step was read and edited before it went in. Nobody on our side is a doctor, and the plan doesn't diagnose or treat sleep disorders.

When to see a doctor instead

Loud snoring, stopping breathing or gasping at night, legs that won't keep still, low mood, bad nights for more than 3 months, or dozing off while driving. Skip the sleep-window step if you have bipolar disorder or seizures, or are pregnant, unless a doctor says it's fine.

Sources

  1. Watson NF et al. Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: a joint consensus statement of the AASM and Sleep Research Society. Sleep, 2015.
  2. CDC National Center for Health Statistics. Sleep difficulties in adults: United States, 2024 data (NCHS Data Brief).
  3. Bootzin RR. Stimulus control treatment for insomnia. Proceedings of the American Psychological Association, 1972.
  4. Spielman AJ, Saskin P, Thorpy MJ. Treatment of chronic insomnia by restriction of time in bed. Sleep, 1987.
  5. Drake C et al. Caffeine effects on sleep taken 0, 3, or 6 hours before going to bed. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2013.