For a long time, the only thing I knew about Pokémon was the shitposter theory that a clown named Mr. Mime was Ash Ketchum’s secret father. I’d never played any of the games or watched the cartoons; it is occasionally hard to explain how I totally missed the Pokémon boat as an elder millennial who had little interest in picking any of it up. But a few months ago, The Pokémon Company finally got me with Pokémon Sleep.
As a lifelong insomniac who had recently regressed to upsetting levels of sleep dysfunction, this was a chance to finally dive into what seemed like a cute, low-stakes, low-barrier-to-entry app that could keep me company at four in the morning. The concept is simple: Pokémon Sleep is framed as a “sleep research study,” where, each week, the player feeds and studies a Snorlax, whose “drowsy power” attracts other pokémon when it sleeps. As the Snorlax grows, it attracts more pokémon, which can be caught as indentured research assistants to collect food for the Snorlax. No one sleeps until the player sleeps. As the day goes on, the helpers get tired — their smiles start to fade, and their little eyelids droop while they wait for the sweet release of unconsciousness.
The only way to play is to sleep; if you want to be good, you need to sleep well, but if you want to be great, you need to sleep consistently well.
Today, a Snorlax is the first thing that greets me in the morning and the last thing I see at night. I’ve been in bed by 2AM for the last 67 nights and had at least seven hours of sleep every single time. Out of these past weeks, I’ve had what Pokémon Sleep deems “S-tier” sleep every week except two, which merely earned an “A” rank. Three times a day, I briefly open the app to cook meals for my Snorlax and distribute candy to my tireless little helpers. I can even recognize a bunch of them now and some of their evolution patterns; the other day, I eagerly paid for extra-expensive gas to qualify for a limited-edition Snorlax car dehumidifier, and just today, I bought a Slowpoke-shaped wrist rest. Is this healthy? I don’t know. Is relying on Pokémon to maintain a manageable sleep cycle a good thing?
To call Pokémon Sleep a game is marketing. It’s essentially a gamified sleep tracker that weaponizes cuteness and the sort of idle, casual pet care psychology that took off when Bandai introduced the Tamagotchi in 1996. It’s free to play, but the microtransactions are there if you want them; if you’re determined to treat your Snorlax like a hardcore gamer’s science experiment, there is all sorts of diehard min-max strategizing going on in the Pokémon Sleep Reddit that flies in the face of the whole chill sleepytime vibe. It also seems to be the most polarizing Pokémon installment — people either love it or hate it, which seems to depend on whether they actually need “help” in the sleep department.
From 2008 to 2014, I needed a lot of help sleeping via heavy medication and therapy (and unofficially, and very inadvisably, alcohol), which helped me maintain the semblance of a “normal” day / night cycle. After I went off my prescription — a weird and wobbly transition into a world without pharmaceutical training wheels — I slowly gained confidence in my internal body clock. For several years, I enjoyed regular unmedicated sleep at mostly appropriate times, and it was great. Then came the pandemic, which sent me hurtling back in time to my oldest and worst friends: insomnia, polyphasic sleep, and the general sense of feeling like shit.
A Snorlax is the first thing that greets me in the morning and the last thing I see at night
When I told my psychiatrist about Pokémon Sleep, she was visibly intrigued, especially given my sleep history and tendency toward addiction. I asked if she thought the app was unethical for someone like me, and without hesitation, she said, “No.” If we operate on the premise that we’re all glued to our phones as adults, she explained, that there’s no real long-term solution to keep people off their phones, something like Pokémon Sleep might actually be doing something productive for people like me. I brought this same question to Stijn Massar, a neuroscientist and research assistant professor at the Sleep & Cognition Laboratory at the National University of Singapore. “I think I would agree with that,” Massar said. “For most adults, staying off phones is a very difficult thing.” I didn’t anticipate such easy endorsement from health and science professionals, but I eagerly accepted it as a sort of quasi-fatalist validation of my new routine.
Pokémon Sleep, though, is supposedly an app for users ages four and up, which seems like a perplexingly young age for a sleep tracker. “Of course you do want kids to engage in healthy behaviors, but does it necessarily have to be through a game… or an app, and what are the side effects of that?” asked Massar, who has young children of his own. For several days before our call, he’d tried to use the app himself, but it had refused to log his sleep. I explained that the app doesn’t necessarily need to be open all day — the more you “work” your food-gathering helpers, for instance, the more tired they get.
“It’s not a typical game in terms of it not being maximized for engagement… there’s a limit to it and there’s a very clear objective of getting habits in sync with what’s supposed to be healthy, so that part is good,” he said thoughtfully. “Like as parents we do everything within our normal capacity to get them to do healthy sleep. Adding phone games to the mix, would that pose any other problems? This of course is something that’s very hard to answer.”