A new study from the University of Edinburgh suggests that workers over 50 may be experiencing a largely hidden sleep crisis. Since I’m well into my fifth decade, I’m comfortably inside that risk group, and like many people, my biggest obstacle to sleep is not always tiredness; it’s getting my brain to stop working.

The researchers found that nearly 70% of participants in its study (which admittedly was quite small at just 45 participants) experienced persistent, clinically significant sleep problems, despite having no known history of sleep disorders. Even more concerning, almost 92% met the clinical threshold for a sleep disorder at least once during the study.

Many of these sleep problems were closely linked to work-related stress, researchers said — which got me thinking about ways I could reduce my own work-related stress, and whether AI could help.

It struck me that there were three easily achievable things that I could do with AI to help me sleep better, so I tried them — and the results surprised me.

Task one: emptying your head

It’s difficult to sleep when you’ve got a million thoughts from the day buzzing around your head. What can help is writing them down. It makes you feel like you don’t need to keep them alive in your brain, because there’s a record of them somewhere. It turns out that AI can be very helpful for this. I used the prompt:

“I’m going to tell you everything currently occupying my mind. Sort it into things I need to do tomorrow, things that can safely wait, and things I cannot control. Keep the response short and practical.”

I then used ChatGPT's Voice mode to perform a brain dump into the AI. ChatGPT turned my vague mental noise into a finite list, and it felt like a weight had been lifted. I could then close the app and put down my phone knowing my thoughts have been “stored” somewhere and weren't going to be forgotten.

Task two: challenging the worry

For this one I took a real concern, like a deadline, unfinished article or packed schedule. Then I described it to ChatGPT, using this prompt:

“This thought is keeping me awake: [insert thought]. Don’t simply reassure me. Tell me what is factual, what I may be assuming, what I can act on tomorrow, and what I need to let go of tonight.”

That instruction to not simply reassure you is important, otherwise ChatGPT may produce soothing but meaningless encouragement. It worked for me, but if you find that still doesn't get you exactly what you want, you could also also ask:

“What is the smallest useful action I can take tomorrow that would make this problem feel more manageable?”

Using this prompt the AI reduces a large amorphous worry to one single action.

Task three: Voice Mode

My last idea was to get ChatGPT to help me wind down. ChatGPT has recently improved its voice mode, and that inspired me to use it to help me wind down at night. Listening to ChatGPT's voice is a lot more relaxing than looking at a screen of course, since you can close your eyes. I tried this prompt:

“Guide me through a five-minute wind-down exercise. Speak slowly, leave pauses, and do not ask me questions. Begin with breathing, then relax each part of my body, and finish with a calm visualization.”

If that doesn’t work for you then you can always get ChatGPT to tell you a story :

“Tell me a calm, deliberately uneventful 10-minute story designed to help me fall asleep. Nothing dramatic should happen, and there should be no questions or cliffhangers.”

I started the voice routine, placed the phone face down and treated ChatGPT like an audio player rather than continuing to chat with it. It worked for me, even if the voice I'd chosen to use wasn't quite as relaxing as it could have been. It's worth experimenting here to find a voice you like.

Best practice

I found all three of these prompts quite effective. The first one, which enabled me to turn all the thoughts spinning in my head into a practical list to deal with tomorrow, was especially helpful.

With all of these exercises, the key is to put your phone down after you’ve done one or more of them. You need to stop interacting with it; remember, the goal is closure, not an endless bedtime conversation.

Once you’ve closed down your day with ChatGPT, you need to close down ChatGPT, too.

You could be forgiven for thinking that most wearable-tech categories have come as far as they're ever going to. All smartwatches look the same now, and that form factor isn’t going away anytime soon. It's a similar story with smart rings, with “slightly thinner” being the main selling point of the Oura Ring 5. And the screenless Whoop tracker has given birth to a bunch of copycats, including the Fitbit Air, and most recently the Garmin Cirqa.

When you think of wearable tech, you normally think of some sort of fitness tracker. But there is an area of wearables that’s still in flux, as categories do before there’s a consensus on what works: neurotech. Neurotech devices are generally wearable technology to monitor, or temporarily alter, our brain chemistry for optimal performance or to treat neurological injuries, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or depression.

They’re also being used to improve our brains to rest harder and focus longer. Our writer Becca Caddy recently wrote about the dangerously addictive thrills of 'over-optimization', so it’s no surprise to see the out-there concept of rewiring the brain being embraced by the cult of biohacking.

Nootropics — mind-enhancing drugs — are promoted heavily on podcasts, with brands like Gorilla Mind and Alpha Brain enjoying airtime on popular ‘bro-science’ platforms like The Joe Rogan Experience to help get ‘cognitively dialed’. Away from pharmacological solutions, multi-millionaire longevity biohacker Bryan Johnson uses Nurosym, an electrical vagus nerve stimulation device, to “make [his] body more parasympathetic, more chill”.

It’s Nurosym that I’ve been using this week. There are other wearables out there that promise to do all sorts of things — the Neurosity Crown for example (pictured above), promises to improve concentration through “neuroadaptive meditation”, measuring your brainwaves and playing music to that pattern to improve focus during work. All while looking like the sort of thing you might see Patrick Stewart wear in the X-Men films.

The Muse 2 headband is a meditation aid that uses electroencephalography (EEG) sensors to read your brain activity and provide personalized meditation guidance, in much the same way as a smartwatch might read your heart rate and offer workout suggestions.

The vagus nerve, however, is a key target for brain health. Proper stimulation of the vagus nerve is said to offer all sorts of benefits, treating conditions as varied as depression, anxiety, inflammation, bipolar disorder, obesity, POTS, and Alzheimer's. For people without those conditions, vagus nerve stimulation can improve sleep quality, regulate stress and improve relaxation overall, ensuring you're well-rested and ready to tackle life's challenges.

There's unconfirmed but promising research suggesting that you may be able to stimulate the vagus nerve yourself through practices such as meditation and cold exposure — which might explain my predilection for cold showers, as perhaps I’ve been unconsciously hacking away at my brain all this time.

But what if I got a wearable to do it for me? I decided to try Nurosym myself for a week, to see if I could really begin to hack my brain better.

The vagus nerve stimulation device costs a whopping $699 / £599 (around AU$1,300), and looks quite stripped-back for a device of this price. It consists of a fairly simple handheld remote, an attached earpiece with a clamp to fix to your tragus (the small piece of cartilage outside your ear) and a charging cable. There’s mercifully no app or phone connection to speak of; everything happens on-device, which actually goes some way to making me trust it more, as it’s not collecting any data about me.

“For a long time, neuromodulation has largely meant invasive procedures or treatment delivered in specialist environments,” Dr Greta Dalle Luche, PhD., Nurosym’s head of science, tells me. “Nurosym demonstrates how this science can be translated into non-invasive technology that fits into people’s everyday lives.”

As well as being a doctor in biochemistry, Dalle Luche is also a former professional surfer, so she knows all about optimizing for peak performance. She explains that Nurosym is all about taking “evidence-led neuromodulation” out of the clinical space and turning it into accessible technology. A lot of clinical tests have been done on this device, and it’s advertised as “the world’s most studied vagus nerve stimulator” with $10 million invested in over 60 independent research papers, backed by notable universities and health bodies worldwide.

To use it, you moisten your tragus, fix the clamp, then adjust the signal on the remote — turning it up until you feel a light tingling sensation. That’s the electricity pulsing through your ear to your vagus nerve, stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system to activate your body’s “rest and digest” response.

It seems like as good a place as any to start. I wet my ear, clamped it onto myself and sat quietly, letting the tingles of electricity wash down my ear canal and into my brain. Nurosym guidelines, and reports on the r/vagusnerve subreddit (because of course there’s a subreddit), suggest that it can take anything from a few days to months to feel the effects, which are said to include a reduction in depressive or anxiety-related symptoms, better sleep, and better-quality rest and relaxation. These claims are anecdotal, and user-dependent, and the results are subjective, with no objective measure of they actually work or produce meaningful results, certainly in a short amount of time such as a week.

Dalle Luche tells me that “factors such as an individual’s underlying vagal tone, or in other words, the ‘health of their autonomic nervous system,’ influence the proportion of the response to the device". So it's possible that I may end up not having a proportional, or significant, response.

Nonetheless, I did my best to empirically measure my body’s responses to this new technology, monitoring my sessions on a Garmin Cirqa fitness tracker as if it was a workout, and wearing it to bed nightly to monitor sleep quality and heart-rate variability.

You can watch our video review of the Garmin Cirqa below:

According to the Garmin, the stimulation did have some effect. There could be any number of contributing factors for this, but after spending 15 minutes at rest to settle my heart, I fired up the Nurosym and monitored my heart rate over a 25-minute session, and I did see a decrease in spikes my heart rate as the session went on. Note the regularity in the middle there, too, between the 10 and 17-minute marks — a clear indication that something was working.

Across the week while using the device, I also saw a general improvement in sleep quality and drastically rising heart-rate variability, as measured here via my Garmin. I’m not sure I saw any immediate, dramatic improvement in focus or relaxation, but the graphs were moving in the right direction.

Whether this is partly due to the sessions enforcing at least 30 minutes of screenless, conscious relaxation time each day, so that my nervous system was deliberately being calmed, or whether it’s due to the device, I’m not sure. But I’ll take the W, as the kids say.

For $700 / £600 / AU$1,300, is 'seemed to work' enough? When I asked about the high price of the device, Nurosym’s head of science Dr Greta Dalle Luche said its price does not reflect the physical device alone.

“It reflects more than a decade of scientific research and development, our proprietary technology, extensive continuous testing to ensure safety and maintenance of regulatory certification, as well as continued investment in clinical research,” she told me. “That makes a direct product-for-product comparison with lower-cost non-validated wellness gadgets difficult.

“When people buy Nurosym, they have the certainty of holding in their hands something that works, and that comes with very little risk.”

While the results have been inconclusive so far, I've seen enough to suggest that something is happening here, so I'll continue electrocuting my brain for a while yet to see if I achieve more definitive results. Wearable neurotechnology is still in its infancy, but it’s a technology that's on the rise, and I imagine, now that Nurosym has done the hard work of all that proprietary testing, there will be more low-strength vagus nerve-stimulation devices hitting the market in the near future.

I’m interested in seeing where the category goes. If companies like Nurosym can bring down prices, and make the technology more accessible, a wearable that improves your quality of relaxation — and which doesn’t harvest your data to feed big tech via an AI-powered app — sounds like a win in my book.