Sleep may be free, but for many, good sleep is consistently out of reach. You can skip caffeine and alcohol all you like, load up on magnesium before hitting the pillow, and attempt to dial in your routine – but, more often than not, a restful sleep is a nightly roll of the dice.
Celebrities, athletes, and billionaires alike, everyone from Elon Musk to Lewis Hamilton, have been championing the revolutionising power of Eight Sleep for a while now. The Pod 4 Ultra – essentially a climate-controlled mattress cover and adjustable bed base – is the latest innovation from the sleep makeover company with a mission to manage as many variables as possible that negatively affect your sleep quality, including temperature and snoring.
The science and nature of sleep are too complex to unpack in this article, so let’s consider just one colossal fact. According to the Sleep Foundation, one-third of adults sleep less than 7 hours each night. Changes in diet, digital stimulation, and mental health, to name a few, are all diluting the quality of our sleep. We don’t have to remind you, but a poor night’s sleep derails everything from professional performance in the boardroom to personal performance in the bedroom.
A wise man once said you should invest your money where you invest your time. Eight Sleep does make after-hours magic happen, it just demands a rather large sum of money for the privilege. So let me unpack it for you before purchase to see what all the fuss is about.
Eight Sleep sent me a Pod 4 Ultra unit to try for this article, but they’re not paying us to write it.
What is Eight Sleep all about?
Eight Sleep is a fully connected biometric sleep regulator with one clear goal in mind: to keep you asleep for longer and improve your sleep quality, with the hope of optimising the user’s overall recovery and performance.
It’s essentially a smart bed cover that affixes to your existing mattress that contains tubing to heat and cool it. Eight Sleep has evolved into a completely digitised offering that’s paired with an app and subscription and now uses AI to tweak your environment through the night autonomously.
Husband-and-wife power duo Matteo Franceschetti and Alexandra Zatarain, founders of Eight Sleep, aimed to extract up to one hour extra of sleep per night. Over a week, a month, or a lifetime, an extra hour adds up to mega numbers and can have a huge impact on your health.
Topline Innovations Of The New Pod 4 Ultra
The Pod 4 Ultra, Eight Sleep’s new halo product, champions dual-zone climate control as its most impressive feature. If you share your bed every night, you can now tailor the temperature of your side of the bed to your preferences, even if they differ from your partner. It’s an absolute godsend if someone runs noticeably hotter than the other. It also allows you to have unique tracking profiles and manage your own sleep data independently of each other.
The other primary party trick of the Pod 4 Ultra is the new adjustable bed base. Now, Eight Sleep offers a climate-controlled mattress topper and a maneuverable unit under the mattress to tweak your horizontal elevation while you sleep. The idea behind this is to mitigate snoring. Using sensors in the mattress, the Pod 4 Ultra can detect snoring and automatically elevate the head by a few degrees until the airways are open enough to stop it.
It’s worth noting you can purchase the Pod 4 mattress cover on its own without the adjustable bed base.
First Impressions Out Of The Box
Let’s talk about the boxes. There are a shitload of them and they’re heavy. It’s all nicely packaged, but the entire operation took about 90 minutes to haul up to the room, put it all together, and connect the mattress topper and the base (the latter being the more cumbersome pain in the arse) to the control unit known as the ‘hub’. I’m already anxious about the day I move house and the Pod 4 has to come with me.
In saying that, aesthetically, all of the components that make up the Pod are minimal and sleek. The mattress topper only slightly changes the feel of the bed and runs unnoticeably under your regular bedding.
It’s worth noting that the autopilot function and its data collection are only accessible with an active Eight Sleep subscription. It’s free for the first year, but costs thereafter. More on that caveat later.
Like any biometric tracker, it takes a while for the unit to learn enough about your sleeping style to optimise the Pod. The first few nights I had the temperature way too cold and had to adjust it manually throughout the night.
Tell Us More About ‘Autopilot’
The core of Autopilot’s mission is temperature regulation. Heat is a key factor in killing your deep sleep vibe and research suggests that it’s harder for people to stay within the important REM and sleep wave cycles when they’re hot. Autopilot gradually adjusts the temperature of the mattress when it detects restlessness to keep you in those key sleep stages for longer. It even detects the ambient temperature of the bedroom and can adjust the Pod accordingly.
Each day the data is there for you to review, and if you’re not fussed, Autopilot doesn’t need any input from you to do its job. It’ll crack on each night regardless, dialling in its knowledge of your sleep patterns to pre-empt your body’s needs before you reach those all-important deep sleep phases.
This also means you can ditch any wearable sleep trackers. I didn’t wear any myself during the first few months to corroborate the data, but the resounding consensus from users suggests it’s pretty much spot on. My partner, who likes the occasional incursion into my sleeping territory for a cuddle, would occasionally see skewed data as she wasn’t fully present on her side of the mattress.
90 Days Later… What Features Did You Find Most Interesting?
The dual-zone temperature control is a game-changer for couples, especially in summer. This is essentially Autopilot’s primary function and, as someone who doesn’t snore, I don’t really get to experience the full function of the bed base.
Only on one occasion was enough snoring detected to trigger a raising of the bed. It’s very subtle, but I’m a light sleeper, so instead of keeping me asleep it woke me up instead. It also raises both sides of the bed as one unit which could be frustrating for the partner. Would it be as bothersome as snoring, though? I suppose it’s an acceptable trade-off.
This year, one of my big personal initiatives is to leave my phone outside the bedroom more often while sleeping. Thankfully, the Pod 4 has a built-in vibration alarm that can be programmed on the app individually each day. It wakes me slowly at a pre-determined time and can also be swapped for a ‘thermal’ option that heats the mattress to the point you wake up.
The app is great at automatically preparing the bed about an hour before your usual bedtime and is intuitive enough to account for time away from the Pod if you’re travelling. If you have multiple beds in different rooms or properties, you can sync them all to the same account.
How Do The Pricing & Plans Work?
Here’s the kicker where the Eight Sleep dream is watered down a little. To unlock the Autopilot function you need to have an active annual subscription. When purchasing a Pod from Eight Sleep for the first time, you get a year’s subscription included. Every year thereafter, however, you need to top it up. This means your physical (and already expensive) product will come back to sting your wallet annually. Here’s a breakdown of the pricing:
While the Pod 4 Ultra is fantastic, it’s mostly a testament to the Autopilot feature. The physical product is fairly one-dimensional without it. You can set temperatures, but they’re not automatically regulated. Similarly, the bed won’t detect and adjust to mitigate snoring on its own accord or analyse your data for you to see improvements over time. If you don’t renew this Autopilot subscription, the entire Pod is basically redundant.
Is The Eight Sleep Pod 4 Ultra Worth It?
Eight Sleep claims the Pod 4 can unlock one extra hour of sleep per night, which should total 15 more days of sleep per year. What amount of money would you part with for that privilege?
Performance-obsessed operators might see $7,000 as a forgettable investment for an edge over the competition. For regular punters, on the other hand, it’s probably a financial stretch.
Though in the grand scheme of things, for all the initiatives we spend our money on to improve our well-being (or all the vices that chip away at it), I do believe Eight Sleep’s tech is a worthy investment and a valuable addition to your bedroom. How much you perceive the ‘value’ of sleep to have — and what dollar figure might match it — is in the eye of the beholder.
As someone who doesn’t snore, if I were to splash the cash on Eight Sleep personally, I’d skip past the Pod 4 Ultra (and its adjustable bed base) and opt solely for the Pod 4 mattress topper.
New Year’s resolutions aren’t my thing. They’re probably not yours either (or you’ve already started tossing yours onto the fire). Perhaps Eight Sleep is your cheat code to unlock a sharper 2025. This way your lifestyle can continue as normal, while your quality of life should ideally improve. Just be prepared for the one-two sucker punch on your wallet.
