One of the biggest culprits of poor sleep is the wrong sleeping temperature. Your body follows a circadian rhythm that adjusts your internal temperature when it’s time for bed: generally your body temperature decreases to help you fall asleep, and drops even further into the first phase of deep sleep. However, the temperature in most bedrooms and beds don’t adjust along with what your body needs. That can lead to less deep sleep — and plenty of wake-ups.
What is Autopilot?
Eight Sleep members have exclusive access to Autopilot: our proprietary algorithm that intelligently mitigates temperature as a disruptor of sleep. With the help of Autopilot, your Pod’s temperature will cool down or warm up your bed to coordinate with your sleep cycles. By regulating your temperature with each sleep cycle, Autopilot actually helps you remain asleep through the night.
The Autopilot algorithm takes a variety of factors into account when creating your sleeping profile each night, including:
- Personal sleep history with the Pod
- Past temperature preferences
- Historical and real-time bedroom temperature
- Historical and real-time local weather
After considering the above factors, Autopilot automatically adjusts your Pod’s temperature to help you get better sleep. As any of these factors change, Autopilot learns, so it can adjust as needed to keep the user at the perfect temperature.
For example: if your room is 5 degrees Fahrenheit colder one night, Autopilot will automatically adjust the Pod’s temperature settings to be warmer, to the precise levels that fall within your range of comfort.
The world’s best sleep will only get better
More recently, we’ve entirely redesigned Autopilot’s ability to adapt to indoor and outdoor temperatures – further ensuring a good night’s sleep in any environment. We have also increased how frequently Autopilot makes adjustments each night to align more with the rhythm of each sleep cycle. This update, labeled as Autopilot 2.5, comes after months of research and a large clinical study on over 1,000 members.
How Autopilot 2.5 works
Throughout the night, you cycle through approximately four to six sleep cycles, each lasting an average of 90-110 minutes. Each sleep cycle comprises deep, REM, light, and wake stages. Towards the beginning of the night, your sleep cycles will comprise more deep sleep. During this time, cooler Pod temperatures will promote deep sleep. In general, you will also be less sensitive to temperature. In the latter half of the night, your sleep cycles will comprise more REM sleep. You will need warmer Pod temperatures during REM sleep and you will be more sensitive to temperature during this time.
Autopilot 2.5 uses this knowledge of human physiology, along with changes in your room and outdoor temperatures, to seamlessly transition your temperature throughout the night from cooler temperatures (deep sleep) to warmer temperatures (REM sleep) to optimize your sleep quality.
Ready to try it out?
- Autopilot 2.5 is only available as part of the Eight Sleep membership. If you have the membership, make sure you have Autopilot turned on. Go to your Profile → Autopilot → make sure “Turn on Autopilot” is toggled on. If you do not see the update, you’ll need to purchase a membership for the feature.
- Set your preferred temperature settings in the app, and Autopilot will do the rest while you sleep.
- Autopilot will notify you when it makes a change. You can also see what Autopilot did each night by checking the Autopilot Summary available through the app’s homepage.
