Over the last year you could have made a pile of money by betting on a little company in the business of ... insomnia. Shares of ResMed, in Poway, Calif., leaped 44%, selling $465 million worth of “sleep-disordered-breathing” equipment--face masks, nasal pillows, humidifiers and so-called continuous positive airway pressure devices. “It’s a monster market; it’s bigger than Ben-Hur,” says Peter C. Farrell, ResMed’s voluble chief executive. You’d have done even better as an original investor in Pacific Sleep Medicine Services, a small chain of sleep centers, mostly in southern California. One of its founders who chipped in an undisclosed amount in 1998 saw his ante jump a hundredfold, says Tom J. Wiedel, Pacific Sleep’s chief financial officer.
A bad night’s sleep is reason for a very big business. Sleeping pills, led by Ambien, rack up more than $2 billion a year in the U.S. Then there is the revenue from overnight stays at sleep clinics, over-the-counter pills, a parade of gimmicks and a thriving business for sleep specialists. For four bucks you can pick up the Insomnia Relief Scent Inhaler (lavender, rosemary, chamomile and vetiver, a grass root) from Earth Solutions of Atlanta. The Original Sound Pillow ($50) comes with two thin speakers and a headphone jack for your iPod or Discman. Spend a bit more ($147) for an MP3-like player called Pzizz that plays music, voices and tones geared to helping you fall asleep. Dreamate, an $80 device worn as a bracelet, supposedly delivers a 6,000rpm massage to the “sleeping golden triangle,” a.k.a. the wrist. Sealy’s Stearns & Foster unit is now selling a $10,000 mattress fit for a princess afflicted with insomnia. It is topped with latex and stitched with real silver threads. Hypnos goes one better, with a king-size mattress filled with layers of silk, cashmere and lamb’s wool and topped with a $20,000 sticker. And coming this spring from Matsushita Electric Works: a room tricked out to induce “deep sleep” within 30 minutes. It includes a reclining bed, sound-absorbent walls and somniferous sights and sounds from a wide-screen TV.
“Sleep is the new sex.” So says psychologist Arthur J. Spielman, associate director of the Center for Sleep Disorders Medicine & Research at New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y. “People want it, need it, can’t get enough of it.” The same could be said of profits. Spielman is coauthor of The Insomnia Answer ($24, Perigee Books, 2006). He is also developing light-delivering goggles that are supposed to help people reset the circadian rhythms that govern when they nod off and wake up, so they fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
Sleep is also the new snake oil--the promise of a good snooze from a book or a bed or a bottle. It’s easy pickings. Who isn’t somewhat slumber-deprived? Given the demands of work and family, no one gets “enough” sleep, whatever that is. The Morpheus mongers point to all kinds of studies on their behalf. The number of Americans who say they sleep less than six hours a night--16% in 2005, compared with 12% in 1998--is on the rise, claims the National Sleep Foundation, which, coincidentally, gets funding from pharmaceutical companies. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, there are 81 chronic sleeping disorders, from apnea, which causes interrupted breathing, to restless leg syndrome. No wonder sleep labs are popping up everywhere--650 and counting, compared with just a few in the mid-1970s.
According to the National Institutes of Health, sleeplessness creates $16 billion in annual health care expenses and $50 billion in lost productivity. Scientists are finding that chronically reduced or disrupted sleep may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. “We know from all the research that sleep is just as important to overall health as exercise and diet,” says Carl Hunt, special assistant to the director of the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute at the NIH.
by Melanie Wells, Forbes (2006) | Read more:
