With National Sleep Awareness Week only a blink of an eye ago, magazines and newspapers were replete with a whole host of statistics about the sleep deprivation of the noughties and which newfangled sleep solutions combat our measly 6.9 hours of broken sleep. Just as we are conforming less and less to 3 discrete meals a day, so we are breaking away from the traditional 8 hour sleep model. Social observers have coined the trend ‘sleep hygiene’ or ‘nibble and nap’ driven by our increasing propensity to break eating and sleeping up into small, portable units.

Losing sleep is no real surprise to anyone in this day and age, as our speed of life is accelerating at an exponential rate and technology is growing in omnipotence, present in our every waking hour. The automotive industry is being largely affected as recent statistics have shown that 30% of all road accidents are being attributed to many more micro-sleeps rather than full fledged naps.

Eager to find the silver lining however, marketers have spun sleep as the latest status symbol, with people bragging more and more about how much they got last night. The supply and demand of sleep solutions is finding its niche in urban environments and hardworking cultures, becoming the latest feature of hotel marketing as “luxury rooms feature the ultimate in sleep hygiene appointments” and corporate wellness programmes “encourage all employees to practice proper sleep hygiene”. Sleep has sparked a luxury goods boom: with sales of expensive night-time products such as beds, mattresses and pillows escalating; Australian hotels repositioning themselves as ‘sleep retreats’ costing up to £10,000 just for a week’s sleep; and pills that create the sensation of 8 hours of quality slumber, with only 1 hour real time.

At the macro level, watch this space for many more weird and wonderful sleep solutions. And at a more micro level, recognizing and adapting marketing strategies around increasingly erratic sleeping patterns could pay dividends in every walk of life.