Does ‘Pokémon Sleep’ Actually Work?

Back in 2016, Nintendo proved that if you dangled the carrot of catching Pokémon in front of people they will go outside and, well, go! Now, seven years after they gamified walking with Pokémon Go, they’re gamifying sleep to help fans get some rest with Pokémon Sleep. As someone who is notoriously bad at sleep, and as someone who has been trying to chase the high of spending my 12^th birthday playing Pokémon Red on my Game Boy Advance — I thought I’d put Pokémon Sleep to the test!

Wait, What’s The Premise Of Pokémon Sleep?

At its core, Pokémon Sleep is a sleep-tracking app that also promises you will literally catch Pokémon in your sleep. In the game, you’re an assistant researcher to Professor Neroli. The professor is investigating how the Snorlax Pokémon and its restful energy strengthen the Pokémon around it. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is for you and your starter Pokémon (a Pikachu) to rest along with the Snorlax and record its restorative effects.

While the Snorlax sleeps, so do you and your Pokémon. Where Pokémon Go rewarded players with better Pokémon the further and faster they walked, Pokémon Sleep adopts the same MO with sleeping. The longer you sleep, the higher your sleep score, the more Pokémon the Snorlax draws to it, and the more Pokémon you can catalogue in your research.

Your starter Pokémon (mine was a Pikachu) also collects food to help you feed the Snorlax, which you are expected to feed at least three times a day. What enables your Pokémon to do this? Rest. If you haven’t gotten enough sleep and your sleep score is low, your starter Pokémon will be too tired to collect ingredients to feed the Snorlax. At every turn, the game encourages the user to rest and record their sleep.

So, How Does Pokémon Sleep Track Your Sleep?

Once, you’ve signed into the app with your birthday and username, and powered through your introductory lectures from Professor Neroli, logging your sleep is the easiest part.

The app asks you to set your goal bedtime (mine is an optimistic 11:30 pm) and automatically sets an alarm for eight and a half hours later (you can change this, don’t worry). Why eight and a half? Well, it’s the ideal amount of sleep your Pokémon pal needs grow its strength — and it’s the only way to get a perfect sleep score of 100.

The app gives you a half-hour warning before your set bedtime. However, players can log up to two sleep sessions a day, including their sleep at night. So, yes, you can log your cheeky nap as well. But you might be wondering, how can the app actually tell you’re asleep?

Somewhat controversially, Pokémon Sleep requires the player to leave the app open, your phone plugged in and resting on the bed somewhere close by you. This is so the app senses and records your movement and sounds as indicators of how deep your sleep is.

When you wake, the app collates the data of your sound and movement into a line graph that tracks your sleep through three phases: dozing, snoozing, and sleeping. The longer you have spent in the “sleeping” phase, the higher your sleep score, and so on and so forth. After 24 hours, the audio recordings disappear from your log. However, according to the terms and conditions, all the recordings are kept by the company. So, if you’re not comfy with Nintendo having recordings of you when you’re asleep, that’s something to consider.

Obviously, this data the app presents to players is not as reliable as, say, data from a sleep study that measures brainwaves. But the goal of Pokémon Sleep is not to provide players with scientifically accurate summaries of their sleep habits as much as it is to encourage rest itself.

It’s… Not For Me, Sorry

If there’s one thing using Pokémon Sleep this last week taught me is that my days of being motivated by Pokémon are behind me. Perhaps it’s the passive nature of the “game”, but there are a lot of tedious mandatory activities built into an app that, allegedly, just wants users to rest.

In fact, the app blew the dust off my Tamagotchi brand of anxiety. On the first day of using it, I forgot to feed my Snorlax throughout the day. When I opened the app, an hour after my goal bedtime (yes, I know, shame on me), I was greeted by my Snorlax and Pikachu in distress from having not eaten or rested. I spent the next five to 10 minutes feeding my Pokémon and rewatching a handful of the numerous tutorials the app expects you to follow.

Caring for the Pokémon helping you “research” is all fine and fun, especially if you’re the type of person who enjoys relaxing video games that simulate caring for pets. However, for me, it began to feel like one more thing I had to remember to do during the day, which seemed contradictory to the app’s overall goal of fostering more rest and relaxation. Ultimately, the volume of Pokémon maintenance made me feel like the app couldn’t decide whether it wants to be a game that keeps users on the app as long as possible or a tool to help people sleep.

But the biggest turn-off for me personally was the requirement of sleeping with your phone plugged in with the screen on and the app running beside you (the app dims the screen for comfort). The only warning against overheating is a notification that reminds you not to put your phone under the blankets with you. Again, what the app asks of you feels counterproductive. Sleeping next to an active phone recording me so I could befriend Pokémon was not conducive to getting more sleep.

Furthermore, if you want to lessen the heat risk and keep your phone unplugged to track, expect some serious battery drainage. I have a two-year-old Huawei P30 Pro. To test how much battery life the app used in a seven-hour sleep session, I charged it to 100 percent, unplugged the phone, closed all other apps besides Pokémon Sleep, and left it beside my pillow to track my sleep. When I woke up, the app had drained my phone’s battery to 31 percent. If that’s not enough to get you through the day, you’ll very likely have to keep your phone charging overnight while using the app.

Personally, I am not comfy running a high energy app on my famously overheating phone. But then again, I live in a house where much of the electrical wiring could apply for a pension as a World War II veteran. So, perhaps, keeping one’s phone plugged in and in use overnight is mostly a me problem.

All that being said, if you were a person motivated to exercise by Pokémon Go, the gamified sleep system of Pokémon Sleep might help you get more quality rest. Also, if you ever wished your Tamagotchi/Nintendogs were relying on your sleep for their survival, Pokémon Sleep could be for you.

Me? I am going back to keeping my charging phone as far away from me as possible when I am trying to get some precious Zs.