Eight Sleep Introduces Menopause Mode to Help Women Stay Asleep as Their Bodies Change

Eight Sleep today introduced Menopause Mode, a new experience for its Pod designed to help women sleep more comfortably from perimenopause through postmenopause. The feature gives women support for temperature-related sleep disruptions and expands the role of the Pod across major stages of women’s lives.

The Pod is Eight Sleep’s sleep system. It fits over an existing mattress, warms or cools each side of the bed, and tracks sleep without a wearable. Menopause Mode is a new setting in the Eight Sleep app that changes how the Pod behaves at night for women in perimenopause and beyond: tailored cooling to help prevent the onset of hot flashes, giving instant relief when one does, and showing how symptoms are affecting sleep.

Hormonal changes can make it harder for the body to regulate temperature. A bed that once felt comfortable can suddenly feel too hot, and night sweats can leave women waking up cold. Menopause Mode is designed to respond to those changing needs throughout the night, with the Pod adjusting its temperature as her preferences, room conditions, and seasons change.

“Nearly every woman will go through menopause, and for most of them sleep is the first thing to break. Night sweats and hot flashes wake you up, and nothing in the bedroom was built to respond. We built Menopause Mode because our research showed the Pod can cut nighttime hot flashes by 56% on average, and we wanted every woman using it to get that benefit automatically,” said Alexandra Zatarain.

From on-demand cooling to menopause-specific data insights

There are three main ways in which the Pod can support women through Menopause Mode:

• The Pod cools down before you overheat. During the night the Pod lowers the temperature on your side of the bed ahead of the hours when hot flashes are most common, and learns your preferred settings over time. These adjustments were built from more than 57,000 nights of sleep data from 450 peri- and post-menopausal women.
• Instant relief during a hot flash. Press a button on the side of the bed and the Pod cools immediately, no phone needed. Pick how long it runs, and it returns to your normal temperature on its own. 8 in 10 women report relief within 10 minutes of using the tool.
• Insights into changing sleep. Members can see how their sleep compares to other women at the same stage. For example: how many times a night they wake compared to other women in perimenopause, whether night wakings dropped after starting hormone therapy, or how a glass of wine before bed affected time awake. Logging symptoms and treatment changes in the app surfaces these patterns over time.

Built on three million hours of women’s sleep at home

Following the launch of Pregnancy Mode earlier this year, Menopause Mode gives Eight Sleep a new way to help members get more from their Pod as their needs change. Both experiences build on the company’s Women’s Sleep Initiative, which has analyzed more than 3 million hours of women’s sleep to understand how changing physiology affects sleep, and turn those findings into better products that address women’s unmet needs.

The Initiative first established how temperature support needs to change throughout a woman’s life. A study of 1,884 women¹ found approximately 5°F differences in preferred bed temperatures across hormonal life stages. Within that same study, women using HRT preferred bedtime settings about 1.5°F warmer than those not using it, while women in their third trimester were among those choosing the coolest settings. It also helped quantify what women have long reported: postmenopausal women averaged more than 1.5 hours less sleep per week² than premenopausal women, underscoring the need to protect sleep during this transition.

Eight Sleep has since set out to measure how much of that burden temperature control can help relieve. In a study of peri- and postmenopausal women³, participants reported 56% fewer nighttime hot flashes on average during a week with Pod temperature control on versus off, with 85% reporting fewer hot flashes. The team also conducted the most comprehensive nightly study of maternal sleep and recovery to date⁴, following women from before pregnancy through six months postpartum. Compared with published wearable-study benchmarks, Pod users averaged approximately 16 additional hours of sleep across the third trimester and 15 more minutes per night postpartum, alongside better cardiovascular recovery metrics.

Menopause Mode brings that research into the bedroom through active comfort and personalized insights in real time. As more women use it, Eight Sleep aims to deepen scientific understanding of menopausal sleep and use those learnings to continually improve the support women receive.

Availability

Menopause Mode begins rolling out globally on October 29th to all subscribed Eight Sleep members through the Eight Sleep app on iOS and Android. The feature requires an active Autopilot membership and an Eight Sleep Pod, both available for purchase on eightsleep.com.

¹ https://www.eightsleep.com/blog/how-women-adjust-pod-temperatures-across-life-stages/

² https://www.eightsleep.com/blog/menopause-not-age-alters-womens-sleep/

³ https://www.eightsleep.com/blog/pod-improves-nighttime-hot-flashes-preprint/

⁴ https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-10934514/v3