Sleep Data Keeping You Awake? ‘The Better Lab’ Is Here to Help

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If the bad sleep data that’s spewing out of your smartwatch or HRV tracker is giving you nightmares, there might be a better way to optimize your Zzzs.

The Better Lab, a new platform from former Strava execs Andrew Vontz and David Lorsch, proactively teaches the healthy practices that unlock the power of sleep.

There are no scores, metrics, or dashboards to keep you up at night in Vontz and Lorsch’s new project.

“We want to make people more mindful with their sleep. We want to teach users good sleep practices and simply show them how it makes them feel better,” Vontz told Velo.

“We’ve worked with top minds in sleep science, behavioral science, and people who are at the intersection of the application of this information,” Vontz said. “We’ve created a system, a combination of SMS and an app, that helps teach good habits and then reinforce them.”

Sleep is nature’s greatest performance enhancer.

It’s when human growth hormone rebuilds muscles and reboots the brain. Some solid deep sleep brings a recovery boost that’s infinitely better than any massage gun or recovery shake.

Sadly, sleep is a part of performance that’s harder to perfect than any set of VO2 Max intervals or “Category A” Zwift race.

The WorldTour caravan drags mattresses, air purifiers, and blackout blinds all across the world in the quest to turn dingy 3-star hotel rooms into perfectly optimized temples to sleep.

Athletes across the peloton are worrying over the sleep scores from their Whoop straps and panicking about the data points provided by their “smart mattresses.”

Elsewhere, weekend warriors, boardroom bigs, and tin-foil hat biohackers are tracking their Zzzs and losing sleep over the numbers they see.

Simplifying sleep with mindfulness-focused approach

The Better Lab strips out the “scores” and takes a more straightforward, proactive approach.

The platform, which was launched by Vontz, Lorsch, and tech guru Eric Hsiao earlier this year, simply shows you how to sleep … “better.”

The Better Lab is a sleep coach, mindfulness app, and journal all at once. There are no biosensors or accelerometers to track how much you slept and in what phases.

“Improving physical performance is relatively straightforward. You hire a coach and stick to the plan. It’s a clear and effective path,” Vontz said in a recent call. “But with other areas of performance, especially sleep, which is the ultimate amplifier of health and wellness, people struggle to get the results that they want.

“They turn to wearables and get stuck in health spectator mode,” Vontz said. “The data they’re getting is of questionable accuracy, and that makes them anxious, which makes them sleep worse. So wearables end up becoming these digital handcuffs.

“The other thing that they do is they consume a lot of content. They read everything online, listen to podcasts by Peter Attia or Huberman Lab. But it goes in one ear and out the other,” he said. “So they end up doing nothing.”

If this all sounds familiar, maybe The Better Lab is for you.

Teaching rather than tracking

Vontz explained that The Better Lab nudges users toward cleaner sleep hygiene and reminds them that it works.

The app issues timely SMS reminders to prompt users toward good sleep “practices” – whether that’s getting to bed earlier, putting the phone away, or forgoing one last nighttime tipple.

The next day, users are prompted to feed back on their mood, workouts, productivity, and daily stresses.

“It’s simple. We’re showing you a correlation between following a good practice and a user’s self-rated sleep quality,” Vontz said. “That highlights how poorly you sleep when you don’t follow your practice, say if you have that latte at 5 p.m. or a third drink with friends.

“It’s like a guided, engaged mindfulness experience,” he said.

It’s a system that taps into the growing belief that sleep data is dud.

Sleep scientists believe that self-rating is the gold standard of sleep assessment, even over clinical-grade sensors. In the athletic community, studies urge coaches to prioritize athletes’ subjective self-measurement over the numbers that are spat out of sensors.

That’s why so many in the data-centric world of pro cycling don’t trust their algorithmic sleep scores and recovery traffic lights.

“We don’t use wearables. We don’t believe the measures are valid and reliable,” Tudor Pro Cycling performance guru James Spragg told Velo.

“Instead, riders report to us their sleep duration and quality. Their own subjective sense of themselves is just as important as data,” Spragg said.

Escaping the sleep data doom loop

So will The Better Lab help you sleep better?

Vontz said his platform is no golden bullet solution. User proactivity is required to unlock perfect sleep.

Better Lab-ers are required to interact with the SMS service and be diligent in following the practices the app is trying to preach.

“Strava was focused on motivated, active people who wanted to make the most of, and have most fun with, what they did out in the world. We’re looking at similar people with sleep,” Vontz told Velo. “They’re people who are focused, motivated, and understand that sleep is the ultimate amplifier of health, wellness, and performance.

“They’ve probably tried a number of other things to hack or track sleep that have failed,” he said. “They probably spent a lot of money, and are tired of being stuck in some data doom loop.”

Could The Better Lab’s data-lite methodology be a drawback for performance-savvy athletes who thrive on kilometers, cadence, power, and hours?

There are no scores, zones, or phases for fitness data junkies to obsess over in this alternate approach to sleep.

It’s a system that will only appeal to those who don’t subscribe to the maxim that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

But who knows?

Vontz and Lorsch helped Strava change cycling with weekly totals, segment stats, and KoM collections.

Maybe they can take the scores out of sleep, too.

The Better Lab is available in the Apple app store and is currently free for U.S. snoozers. A premium subscription service will be launched in due course.