Battling Sleep Deprivation in Singapore with Pokémon Sleep

Singaporeans are notoriously sleep-deprived. Could a popular mobile app game help us get more sleep? Follow one Singaporean’s quest to rest their best in the new year.

It's almost the end of 2024 and time to start planning wellness goals for 2025. My New Year’s resolution is to average seven hours of sleep a night, the minimum amount recommended for adults 18-64 years old by the National Sleep Foundation. To help me to get more sleep, I tried Pokémon Sleep for two weeks to see if the smartphone game could supercharge my slumber.

How Pokémon Sleep Works

Pokémon Sleep is a sleep tracker app for Android and iOS users released by The Pokémon Company in late July 2023. Similar to how Pokémon Go “gamified walking” by encouraging players to roam around their cities to catch location-specific Pokémon, Pokémon Sleep aims to support healthier lifestyles by “[turning] sleep into entertainment.” The popular app reached 10 million downloads in late August 2023. 

The game’s premise is that you are a researcher helping Professor Neroli understand Snorlax’s ability to put nearby Pokémon to sleep. During the day, you work with the Professor to raise a cuddly Snorlax by feeding it berries and meals to increase its Drowsy Power. When it’s time to go to bed, you place your smartphone or a Pokémon GO Plus + Bluetooth device next to your pillow and turn on sleep mode.

Throughout the night, the app uses your phone’s accelerometer to track your body movements and estimate your sleep duration and quality. The more sleep you track, the higher your sleep score. Your sleep score is then multiplied by your Snorlax’s Drowsy Power, and the higher the resulting number is, the more Pokémon appear around your campsite the next morning for you to add to your Sleepdex.

Every week you get the chance to grow a new Snorlax on a new research site. Rack up data on Pokémon sleep styles in your Sleepdex and you can unlock idyllic islands like Snowdrop Tundra or Cyan Beach to discover new Pokémon.

Sleepless in Singapore

Unfortunately, our real-life island nation is not as relaxing as the game’s landscapes. In fact, Singapore consistently ranks among the worst countries in the world when it comes to sleep.

According to a 2014 survey by Jawbone, Singapore ranked the third most sleep-deprived city out of 43 cities, trailing behind Tokyo and Seoul. Based on the Philips 2021 global sleep survey, Singaporeans averaged 6.8 hours of sleep a night. In 2022, a YouGov survey concluded that “only one in four people in Singapore (27%) have an ideal sleep cycle (of 7 hours or more).”

To better understand the state of Singapore’s sleep deprivation, I talked with Professor Michael Chee, Director of Centre for Sleep and Cognition at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. Prof. Chee identified Singapore’s intense work culture and test-driven academic pressure as key socio-cultural factors impacting sleep for working adults and students in Singapore. 

In a 2023 study published in Sleep Medicine, Prof. Chee and a team of researchers from the Centre for Sleep and Cognition assessed sleep data from over 220,000 users of the Oura Ring, a consumer sleep tracker, across 35 countries. They found that “people in Asia have shorter sleep …and lower sleep efficiency” than people in Europe, Oceania and North America. The team hypothesized that work culture differences impact sleeping patterns. 

Prof. Chee compared long working hours in Asian countries like Singapore with different social norms towards work in other countries. “In parts of Europe where they sleep more, like in France, they have actually got legislation against contacting workers post-office hours for work reasons,” Prof. Chee explained. In contrast, East Asian societies normalize highly demanding schedules. For example, “in China, they have the 996 culture, [working] 9am to 9pm, 6 days.”

While Prof. Chee recognizes the difficulties of obtaining adequate sleep under these work conditions, he stresses that “you need to invest—just as you invest money and invest the time in developing your career—in your health and mental well being.”

The Two Week Challenge

Determined to fix my sleep habits, I decided to test if Pokémon Sleep would incentivize me to sleep earlier and longer. I’ve tried various fitness watches, meditation apps, and sleep tracker wristbands to improve my sleep, but never a game. As a Pokémon fan, I was eager to see if the reward of collecting cute Pokémon would help me rest more peacefully. 

To stay accountable, one of my colleagues joined me on the two week challenge and we added each other as friends through the Pokémon Sleep “Research Community” feature. Since we could see each other’s daily sleep scores, this gave me extra incentive to sleep more. 

The first night was somewhat of a failure. Since the phone needs to be on the mattress with the application open to track your sleep, I hopped into bed with my mobile device in hand just before midnight. Instead of pressing the button to start my sleep session right away, I ended up doom scrollingon Instagram until 2:00 AM before finally initiating sleep tracking on the app. 

The need to keep the phone nearby is probably my biggest issue with Pokémon Sleep’s design. Most sleep guidelines suggest decreasing night-time electronics use, since the blue light from screens interferes with our body’s biological clock and how we produce melatonin, a hormone that plays a role in sleep. The application needs to be running for the tracking to work, and although the phone can be face down, the temptation to reach over and watch YouTube or answer texts is real. 

Despite these flaws, I appreciated how the app made sleep tracking fun, magical, and interactive. The joy of discovering new Pokémon sleep styles the next morning, like Charmander’s Crackling Sleep or Mareep’s Fluffy Sleep, did motivate me to regularise my sleep schedule. (You get extra bonuses and rewards if you stick to a consistent bedtime and wake-up time, attracting new snoozing Pokémon.)

The kawaii animation and nostalgic music further enhanced the game’s soothing qualities. I got a little sleepy just watching my Snorlax slumbering away and yawning every few seconds. 

While my colleague couldn’t be bothered to feed Snorlax to increase its Drowsy Power, I enjoyed concocting smoothies, pies, and curries in the game during the day. As the food was cooking, a pop-up screen would appear with bite-sized advice on how to improve sleep. These pointers were adapted from consultations with pioneering sleep researcher Dr. Masashi Yanagisawa, President and CEO of S’UIMIN Inc., providing nice edutainment value.

Perhaps the best part of the game is that it visualizes your sleep data in a lighthearted and engaging way. Each morning you receive a graph of your sleep styles, from “dozing” (lots of tossing and turning), to “snoozing” (some movement or snoring), and “slumbering” (deep sleep with little noise). Your dominant sleep style will then attract Pokémon who sleep in the same way. For example, after one particularly restless night, the pig monkey Pokémon Mankey appeared at my campsite in Angry Sleep.

The report even includes audio recordings from the night before, which are a little embarrassing but illuminating. My audio recordings revealed I scratched a lot in my sleep, irritated by rashes; my colleague was amazed and aghast to hear herself grinding her teeth, which made her make an appointment with a dentist. 

Although I suspect Pokémon Sleep is less precise than other sleep trackers, the upside is that the free app makes it enjoyable to keep an eye on how much shuteye you’re getting.

And yes—over the two weeks, my informal experiment recorded some improvements.

My average daily sleep score (amount of time asleep) went from 68 points in the first week to 73 points in the second week. Meanwhile, my sleep consistency score (how regular my sleep routine was) jumped from a C in the first week to an A in the second week. Overall, my average daily sleep increased from 5 hours and 49 minutes in the first week to 6 hours and 11 minutes in the second week. That’s 22 precious minutes!

For Kids?

After my successful sleep challenge, I was curious about the game’s potential to help children learn good sleep habits. The kid-friendly graphics are a huge draw and Pokémon Sleep even adjusts its gameplay for young players. For example, players who are 15 years old and under need to sleep at least 11 hours to achieve the maximum sleep score of 100,  which game designers based on the guidelines from American pediatrics. 

To explore if Pokémon Sleep could be a parenting tool, I communicated over email with Assistant Professor June Chi-Yan Lo from the Centre for Sleep and Cognition at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. Asst. Prof. Lo has researched extensively on sleep health and neurobehavioral functions in children and adolescents. 

Asst. Prof. Lo noted that the game’s benchmark of 11 hours of sleep every night is considered “may be appropriate” only for older teens as “the National Sleep Foundation recommends children aged 6 to 13 years and adolescents aged 14 to 17 years to sleep 9 to 11 and 8 to 10 hours respectively.”

According to Asst. Prof. Lo, Pokémon Sleep “may make it fun for children to get more sleep,” and could provide a “good way for parents to change their children’s sleep timing in addition to following basic sleep hygiene.” 

However, she observes that “young children may not have their own phone” and “notifications and messages received in the middle of the night may disrupt sleep if the phone is placed next to their pillow or bed and not switched to Do Not Disturb mode.” Furthermore, “some children may be tempted to use the phone or app during their sleep hours if it is placed in their bedroom,” she says. (Much like adults.)

Cannot Defeat Biology

The Pokémon franchise is well known for epic battles. As I approached the end of the two week challenge, I was reminded of Prof. Chee’s description of sleep deprivation as “a slow fuse time bomb,” “one that will blow up because you basically cannot defeat biology.” As he emphasizes, sleep is “a biological imperative” that Singaporeans are all too experienced trying in vain to overcome.

To quote from the Pokémon Sleep teaser trailer, “rest is the strongest healing move—even for humans!” We gotta catch ‘em z’s if we want to keep happy and healthy in the new year. Parents can find more tips from Asst. Prof. Lo in the Sleep and Health Laboratory’s sleep guide for school-age children.

Written by Jamie Uy
Illustrated by Jansen Michelle

This article was originally published in Science Centre Singapore's previous blog, I Saw the Science, on 16 January 2024. The article has been lightly edited and republished with new graphics for Void Deck.

Last updated: 1 November 2024