Brian Dunning critiques the "sleep maxing" fad, debunking TikTok trends like mouth taping, which risks asphyxiation per a 2025 PLOS One review, and wearable-induced orthosomnia. He exposes the dangers of "sleep hanging," citing a 2024 Chongqing death, and dismisses blue light glasses as ineffective. While acknowledging legitimate treatments like CBT-I and CPAP, Dunning argues that unproven supplements and anxiety-driven optimization worsen sleep, urging listeners to trust medical professionals over influencers for genuine rest. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Dental Issues From Mouth Taping00:08:13
Are you looking for that special edge over your competitors?
Or even over everyone in general?
You may have heard that getting better sleep will sharpen your mind, strengthen your body, boost your immune system, and all kinds of things.
You might decide to turn to TikTok to find out how the influencers are recommending you can achieve this.
And if you do, you're likely to find out that all you have to do is embrace a huge laundry list of crazy-sounding practices called sleep maxing.
Extended content for premium members, a quick primer on the one sleep intervention best proven to work for real.
That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
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You're listening to Scaptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Scaptoid.com.
A Skeptic's Guide to Sleep Maxing.
Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.
If you are one who eagerly follows wellness influencers on TikTok, you have no doubt heard of the fad of sleep maxing.
spelled with two x's because why not, a way to hack your sleeping and thus derive a vast array of health benefits, which the rest of us are denied.
Ordinary sleeping, we're told, the type all animals have practiced for hundreds of millions of years, is fundamentally broken and non-functional and will throw you into a spiral of fatigue and disease.
Luckily, online influencers in their 20s with no relevant education have uncovered the secrets that have eluded all living creatures and generations of sleep scientists.
A combination of practices and products, of course products, that will turbocharge your sleep, make you healthier than healthy, and improve every aspect of your life.
Sleep is, of course, very important.
Sleep is when your body and brain go to work.
Your body restores and heals.
Your brain organizes and properly stores the day's memories.
It's necessary to maintain decent overall health and for normal cognitive and memory function.
However, sleep can also be difficult for creatures like ourselves, who tend to do things like injure our bodies and develop chronic pain, and to gain weight to make sleeping and breathing difficult, and to wrestle with complicated emotional and psychological issues that distract us and prevent our brains from letting us fall into the required peaceful state.
Sleep disorders can be both serious and complicated to solve.
Consequently, sleep science has long been an important field of study.
Sleep doctors now have a pretty good array of treatments for those whom sleep eludes.
The first line of defense is sleep hygiene managing the conditions in your bedroom, minimizing naps, avoiding late alcohol, and other behaviors.
There's cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia to help you change thoughts and behaviors that cause wakefulness.
There are devices like CPAP machines to assist the breathing challenged.
With better nighttime breathing.
And as a last resort, there are drugs for more immediate, short term, high powered attacks on any of these causes of sleep interruption.
Any good sleep doctor should be able to dramatically improve the sleeping of nearly any person who suffers from sleep deprivation, if that person is willing to put in the work.
Not everyone is, and that brings us to online influencers one group of people pitching magically easy solutions to complicated problems.
Sleep-maxing influencers, however, don't merely promise to help those with sleeping problems achieve better natural sleep.
They pledge to turn anyone into a sleeping powerhouse who will wake up more supercharged than anyone else.
If you're an experienced Scaptoid listener, you've heard some variation of this a thousand times before.
No matter the problem, someone is selling a magically easy solution, often when there isn't even a problem.
Sleep maxing comes with fortuitous timing.
Many online communities, particularly in the wellness space, are experiencing elevated concerns about self-care, mental health, and burnout.
So it lands among a community particularly well-primed to embrace any solution to those woes.
Like most wellness fads, it blends a certain amount of common-sense-level recommendations, much of basic sleep hygiene, with its pseudoscientific recommendations.
This gives it the skin-deep appearance of legitimacy, and it deceptively rebrands those sleep hygiene practices as sleep maxing.
Oh, I see you're avoiding caffeine before bedtime.
Good for you for doing sleep maxing.
No, that's just basic sleep hygiene, which has been understood since the 1800s.
From there, sleep maxing descends into an abyss of woo.
Let's go through some of its basic recommendations one at a time, beginning with mouth taping.
This is probably the most commonly heard technique from sleep maxing influencers.
Tape is placed over the mouth to prevent mouth breathing and reduce snoring, supposedly resulting in better sleep quality.
What kind of tape, not just any tape, but special mouth tape, you can buy from those very same influencers?
I found headlines like, Top 5 Mouth Tapes for 2026 and 3 Best Mouth Tapes for Beards.
Like many people, taping your mouth at night is unlikely to cause you any problems beyond discomfort and irritation.
Also, keeping your mouth shut for seven or eight hours at a stretch is going to make a nice bacterial breeding ground, since the flow of saliva is likely to be greatly reduced or even stopped for the duration.
Over time, you're likely to have more dental issues and bad breath.
But all of this can be addressed by upping your oral hygiene game.
But for some, the effects of mouth taping can be much worse, which is why you won't find it recommended by sleep therapists.
Difficulty breathing is the biggest risk.
All you need is to be a bit congested at night, and if you fall asleep with tape on, your oxygen intake can be greatly reduced.
Panic attacks are somewhat common.
The sensation of being unable to open your mouth can trigger anxiety, which can last all night, a huge enemy of restful sleep.
The worst case is asphyxiation, a possibility for some with a nasal obstruction.
However, if this is going to happen to you, you're pretty likely to notice your inability to breathe long before you actually fall asleep.
A 2025 literature review published in PLOS One looked at dozens of studies on mouth taping.
The Dangers of Sleep Tape Anxiety00:02:21
Evidence of any benefits was rare and inconsistent, and as for the risks, the study concluded simply it seems that there is a potentially serious risk of harm for individuals.
indiscriminately practicing this trend.
This December, prepare for a skeptical doubleheader featuring two separate and distinct skeptoid adventures.
We kick things off with the New Orleans Escapade from December 4th through the 6th, 2026.
More information on that specific adventure is coming soon, but mark your calendars now and stay tuned.
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Running through December 13th, this week-long cruise takes us to the Yucatan Peninsula for a deep dive into each port's Maya history.
First, Cozumel, the ancient island of swallows and a once sacred pilgrimage site.
Then, the Roatan Bay Islands with their famed ancient coral reefs and stories of haunted caves.
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As an archaeologist, ethno historian, and host of Tales from Astlantis podcast, Curley is a leading voice in reclaiming indigenous history and debunking the pseudo history and ancient alien myths that often distract from the truth.
He'll reveal the sophisticated scientific and mathematical achievements of the Maya and explore the deep roots of Nahua philosophy, giving us a powerful, authentic lens into this vibrant history before we step off the ship to explore the ruins ourselves.
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That's skeptoid.comslash adventures.
Why Blue Light Glasses Fail00:09:56
Wearable Electronics The sleep maxing influencer not prominently displaying their wearable electronic sleep tracking products is virtually unheard of.
Yet, they are more products that can be hawked.
These include the Apple Watch, the Aura Ring, the Whoop, the 8 Sleep Pod, the Rise phone app, Garmin devices, and more.
Influencers advocate checking your sleep studies religiously to identify trends and make various adjustments to your routines.
It's hard to imagine any creature from the past hundred million years actually being able to sleep without analyzing each night's data to make routine changes.
The problem that this causes, almost invariably, is that people find themselves stuck pursuing elusive perfect scores, triggering anxiety, which worsens sleep.
Sleep researchers have found that the popularity of these sleep trackers has grown so much that the distress deserves a whole new diagnosis on its own.
It's called orthosomnia, an unhealthy obsession with achieving perfect sleep, driven by anxiety over the data from wearable fitness trackers and apps.
Supplements Influencers typically recommend taking melatonin and magnesium supplements.
Neither should be expected to produce any noticeable benefits, so you're better off saving your money.
Melatonin is recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine for certain sleep disorders.
However, there's a lack of evidence that it provides any benefit in the absence of a disorder.
Additionally, the amount that your body produces naturally is tiny, on the order of micrograms, whereas over-the-counter supplements typically come in milligrams.
That's three orders of magnitude too high.
Logically, this would be a terrible way to subtly nudge something that is so small and precise.
Some influencers even recommend mega dosing on milligrams.
Putting that balance even farther out of whack.
Magnesium has slightly more plausible support, with some evidence showing it can help with poor sleep quality.
However, like melatonin, the evidence is strongest in the presence of a disorder, such as insomnia, and strongest with older adults.
Magnesium, however, is more pharmacologically active and has quite a few drug interactions, so it should always be taken with caution, and the only sound recommendation is to do it under your doctor's supervision.
Absolutely do not take it because a social media influencer said to.
Blue Light Glasses Sleep maxing influencers recommend wearing blue light glasses for the last few hours of the day before going to bed.
Some even recommend wearing them to bed.
The purpose is inspired by the same reason your phone has a night mode, where after a certain time in the evening, its color will shift to a warmer hue.
The idea is the higher amount of blue light in daylight is an important indicator for your brain to maintain your circadian rhythm.
If there's blue light, the brain thinks it's daytime.
and does not produce enough melatonin for quality sleep.
Wearing blue light glasses is claimed to block out all the blue light.
The problem is, blue light glasses are typically clear.
If anything, they have an invisible UV coating to block ultraviolet light.
However, UV is not relevant to your brain, only the color that you can perceive.
Tests have shown that the typical blue light glasses block only about 10-20% of the blue end of the spectrum.
Whereas 90% blocking of blue light at the 420 nanometer wavelength would be necessary to meaningfully intervene with your circadian rhythm.
Regardless, the amount of blue in your home's ambient light is very near the bottom of important environmental cues that can impact your sleep.
Definitely don't waste money on blue light glasses.
More extreme nonsense.
So far as I could find, there's been only one death caused by sleep maxing influencer recommendations, and it happened in China in 2024.
A few influencers have recommended sleep hanging, which is horrifyingly exactly what it sounds like.
You hang yourself by the neck, just not with the noose tight enough to cause total asphyxiation.
And if that's not insane enough for you, You're supposed to swing.
Why?
Obviously, there is no why.
Everything about this notion is crazy, wrong, and dangerous.
From what little information has trickled into the English language media, an influencer named Sun Rong Chun in China was advocating this for pain relief for people with cervical problems.
It's an extreme version of the actual traction therapies used by doctors.
People who tried it also reported getting better sleep.
So one guy tried it for that reason alone, a 57-year-old man in Chongqing in early 2024, and it turned out to be the last thing he ever tried.
Notice that, on the whole, these sleep-maxing interventions are almost all counterproductive, actually making the problem they claim to solve worse.
The result?
All too often, the destructive behavior feeds on itself, digging ever deeper into the sleep-maxing obsession.
trying to achieve improvement, but producing only worsening.
And so the influencers become more and more popular as their followers get more and more desperate.
That researchers have had to create a whole new diagnosis, orthosomnia, should be enough of a red flag to scare you away from following social media sleep influencers.
It shows that they are doing real harm.
Get rid of your sleep tracker.
Stop taking bedtime supplements.
Make your room as comfortable as you like it, and enjoy your private resting time the way you like to.
If you're having some particular problem with sleep, help is available, scientifically proven help, from your local sleep doctor, to whom your regular doctor will be happy to give you a referral.
And if you're not having a problem with sleep, the last thing you should be trying to do is to fix that.
If you're not springing out of bed feeling like Superman every morning, It doesn't mean you're not taking enough supplements or buying the right gadgets from the right influencers.
It means you're human, like the rest of us.
That's not always such a terrible thing.
We continue with a quick primer on the one sleep intervention that actually does work CBTI, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, in the ad free and extended premium feed.
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