How a Biological Function Became a Billion-Dollar Anxiety Machine.
A long time ago, nobody tracked their REM cycles (without a smart device, how would you?). Nobody sold you a supplement stack for sleep onset. There was no recovery score waiting on your wrist in the morning, no algorithm judging the quality of your unconsciousness, no thirty-seven-step wind-down protocol circulating on wellness TikTok. You just slept.
That time is gone, and it didn’t disappear because humans suddenly forgot how to sleep.
It disappeared because sleep joined a growing list of ordinary human experiences that can now be tracked, scored, optimized, and sold back to us. Surprised? If you’ve been following my FADS posts, you shouldn’t be. And neither am I.
The Aisle That Didn’t Used to Exist
Walk through any pharmacy or grocery store and look at what happened to the sleep section.
Melatonin alone now comes in gummies, capsules, sublingual strips, timed-release tablets, and dissolvable powders in dosages ranging from 0.5mg to 20mg, most of which have no meaningful clinical distinction from one another.
Next to it? Magnesium in four different forms, each marketed toward a slightly different version of the same anxiety. Then the CBD tinctures, the ashwagandha blends, the L-theanine capsules, the valerian root tea. Behind those, the mouth tape. Next to those, the blue light glasses. Online, the weighted blankets, the cooling mattress toppers, the white noise machines, the blackout curtains, the sleep tracking rings that cost more than a flight to somewhere that might actually help you relax.
The category didn’t expand because a new problem arrived. It expanded because an old anxiety found new infrastructure. The product exists before the diagnosis.
As I’ve said before, that is always the tell.
The History the Sleep Industry Would Prefer You Forget
Here is something that tends to get buried beneath the sleep scores, supplement stacks, and optimization protocols: humans haven’t always slept the way we think they did.
Historian Roger Ekirch spent decades digging through diaries, court records, literature, and medical texts and found something strange. Before artificial lighting became widespread, many people appear to have slept in two shifts.
They slept for several hours, woke for an hour or two in the middle of the night, and then slept until morning. The middle period had names. The watch. The waking hour. People prayed, read, talked, had sex, or thought about things. Then, they went back to bed.
Nobody panicked because they were awake at 2 a.m. Nobody stared at the ceiling, wondering if their sleep score was being destroyed. Nobody reached for an app.
The idea that healthy sleep consists of one uninterrupted eight-hour block is much newer than most people realize.
Like many modern standards, it arrived alongside industrialization.
Factories wanted predictable schedules. Employers wanted workers awake at predictable times. Artificial lighting stretched the day. Alarm clocks imposed structure. Gradually, one version of sleep became normal, and normal became correct.
Once it became something you could do wrong, it became something the market could fix.
Melatonin for Sleep Is a Useful Case Study
Melatonin is one of the most successful sleep products ever created. Which is interesting, because its actual job is fairly modest.
Melatonin is a hormone your body produces in response to darkness. It helps regulate circadian timing. It can be genuinely useful for jet lag and certain sleep schedule disruptions.
What it doesn’t do reliably is many of the things consumers assume it does. It doesn’t consistently deepen sleep. It doesn’t reliably improve sleep quality. It isn’t a cure for insomnia.
More interestingly, the doses sold commercially are often dramatically larger than those commonly used in research settings. A consumer can easily buy 5 mg or 10 mg tablets, while studies frequently find measurable effects at doses closer to 0.5mg.
Yet the category keeps expanding. Not because the science changed, but because the anxiety did.
The sleep category occupies a nearly perfect commercial position. Everyone sleeps. It’s normal to have a rough night of it. Some people always struggle. The feedback is subjective, and the results are difficult to measure. The unlucky consumer is always so tired and desperate that they keep trying.
That’s a remarkable market, and guess who noticed? Cannabis.
Cannabis Found the Door and Walked Through It
Cannabis had been waiting for a respectable front door for a long time.
The door turned out to be sleep support.
Today, CBD and low-dose THC products increasingly arrive dressed as wellness rather than recreation. The marketing barely had to change. The anxiety was already there. The consumer already wanted rest. The category just needed a reason to show up at bedtime that didn’t require explaining itself.
The incentives practically wrote the campaign themselves.
It also didn’t hurt that Boomers, the demographic most likely to experience age-related sleep disruption and least likely to have ever thought of themselves as cannabis consumers, turned out to be exactly who the wellness reframe was built for.
The Middle Path Is Boring, Which Is Why It Doesn’t Sell
The extremes are easy to describe.
On one end, the full optimization stack: the tracker, the supplements, the mouth tape, the cooling pad, the wind-down protocol, the morning readiness score. A nightly production that costs real money and generates the satisfying feeling of having taken the problem seriously.
On the other, a position that was celebrated not that long ago: sleep deprivation as a badge. Running on five hours. Bragging about it. The hustle-culture version of adulthood, where needing sleep was weakness and the people who required eight hours were simply less serious than the people who didn’t.
Both extremes are products of the same performance culture. One treats sleep as something to perfect. The other treats it as something to overcome.
The middle path is less dramatic. Consistent wake times. A cooler room. Darkness during sleep and light shortly after waking. Less alcohol. Less caffeine. The cognitive behavioral therapy protocol for insomnia consistently outperforms medication long-term and probably costs less than a month of supplements.
Of course, some products are genuinely useful in specific situations, and the middle path leaves room for them. Melatonin for jet lag. Magnesium for people who are actually deficient. The occasional sleep aid during acute stress.
Truth is, the useful situations comprise a much shorter list than the aisle suggests, and a much quieter relationship with sleep than the industry would prefer.
The category expanded far beyond its original usefulness into selling the feeling of addressing a problem. And of course, every sale helps sustain that cycle.
The system doesn’t need you to sleep badly. It just needs you to wonder, right before you fall asleep, whether you’re doing it wrong.