Almost half of the people in the United States are getting less than six hours of sleep – an alarming statistic about one of the most important pillars of our longevity. Michael Byrne offers an innovative way to get better sleep through their groundbreaking new tech at Bia Neurosciences. Sitting down with Zach Gurick, he presents their sleep mask that uses non-invasive brain stimulation and neural feedback to improve sleep quality and allow people to achieve deep sleep like never before. Michael shares how their invention is not only focused on getting longer sleeping hours but also on experiencing refreshed mornings every single day.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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How To Get Better Sleep With Michael Byrne
Welcome back to Fully Alive, where we are unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. I’m your host, Zach Gurick. We’re diving into one of the most overlooked but powerful pillars of longevity, which is sleep. Our guest, Michael, is the co-founder of Bía Neuroscience. It is a company on the cutting edge of neurotechnology that’s reimagining how we sleep, recover, and recharge without any pills, melatonin, or any side effects.
Michael and his team have developed a sleek, science-backed device that uses non-invasive brain stimulation and neural feedback to help users fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and wake up feeling more refreshed. You can double the amount of deep sleep you get by using this device. Whether you’re a high performer, a biohacker, or someone tired of being tired, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss. We’ll explore the neuroscience behind the Bía device, how it compares to other sleep tools, and what it can mean for the future of aging, cognition, and overall well-being. Grab a cup of tea, maybe not coffee for this one, and let’s dive into this conversation with Michael from Bía Neuroscience.
Introducing Bia’s Sleep Mask
Michael, welcome to the show. I’m excited to have you on. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation, and I’m excited for our readers to learn about the amazing work that you’re doing in this new product that you’re launching, Bía Neuroscience. As we kick things off, what inspired the creation of this new device? When you describe it, do you call it a device?
Generally, it’s a product. It’s a very generic name.
What inspired the creation of this Bía Neuroscience product and its focus on sleep optimization? Maybe walk us through the background and history.
The very quick, short answer is my wife doesn’t sleep well. That was generally enough motivation on its own. I am finding it as the bullet point life story that led to it. I studied biopsychology in school. I was looking into impaired schizophrenia. I was thinking a little bit more. I thought it’d be on the extreme side. When I go out there, there are high-intensity, exciting experiences every day at work on the psychology side of things. I quickly learned that studying and working are two vastly different things.
When I started getting into the working angle on that, it was generally upsetting. It was difficult to see people in that state and seeing them struggle. It wasn’t for me. I moved on and finished my degree as quickly as I could. I got into the working world. I started working at a neurofeedback clinic. You see everything under the sun, and people are generally coming in here when other things haven’t worked. We were seeing anxiety, depression, concussion, insomnia, everything under the sun was coming through the door.
I was very hands-on. I was putting sensors on people’s heads, looking at their activity, talking to psychologists to make sure we’re going the right angle, and more or less trying to adjust people’s brain activity to be in a healthier, balanced state. The hard part with feedback in a clinical setting like that is that, in anxiety, for example, what it looks like for you versus what it looks like for me can be different things and different pictures. There can be a pretty broad range. How do you get some “objective measurement” of how well things are going, especially when you’re seeing twenty different issues coming through the door?
The one thing we always ask is, “How was your sleep?” The reason why we ask that is that sleep is generally consistent from person to person. It is not necessarily the quality of sleep. When someone has a great night’s sleep, their brain activity is generally around the same pattern. Sleep stage one looks the same across almost all the humanities. Same thing with stage two, and so on. Sleep architecture has variability within it. The total sleep time has variability within it, but how you feel when you wake up after a good night’s sleep is consistent. What your brain looks like when you’re asleep looks consistent.
That was something we always asked. That’s where I got a little bit of the first inkling into the sleep space. While I was working there, I quickly learned that I enjoyed the business end a little bit more than the hands-on end. I liked fixing the system of how things were working more than I did being hands-on with the clients. I started working on the operations side of the clinic there as well, and growing the business.
Moving on to a sleep supplement company, I saw an opportunity there. They had one hire at the time, who was now my co-founder here. We had the startup experience before, but he was the first hire, and I was the second hire. I hit it on everything front-end. I did everything back-end. I grew that company as well. At the end of the day, we were selling 500 bottles a day of sleep aids. I saw millions of customers get deep into that experience.
We started to see the problem in the sleep space. Even with our own supplement, people were churning every 3 to 6 months because they stopped working for them. Your body gets used to melatonin, for example. They weren’t seeing the results after a few months. You see that across the board in the sleep space. With blackout blends, for example, you go from what you thought was okay sleep to great sleep. After a little while, that becomes your baseline, and you realize, “I still have an entire mountain to climb here in terms of quality sleep.” People generally get a bit of progress, and then they buy the next thing, and then they have twenty sleep products at home.
We try to curate and bundle this together into something that actually will work. When we started diving into this, there had to be something better out there. There’s got to be a way to do this properly. That’s what led us to build Bía Neuroscience to build the Bía Sleep Mask. What we’re doing here is we’re making it as easy as possible to use. We’re skipping the steps. One of the most effective techniques out there right now is called CBTI, which stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia. It’s incredibly arduous. They have a high drop-off rate because you’re asking people who are not sleeping well to do a substantial amount of work and change their habits.
We’re like, “We can’t do that. We need to make this incredibly easy to use. Let’s skip the steps. Let’s go straight to the brain and retrain the brain directly.” Also, the app experience, anything that the customer touches, needs to be seamless. We don’t have this yet, but part of what we’re going to have launching is once you have a program set, power on the mask, put it on, and we’ll start. It’ll know your program. That’s all you have to do. Put on the mask. It’ll go. Making it as easy as possible to use was part of the goal.
The other part was sustained sleep improvement, changes that will last, not that are going to be dependent on chemicals, and not that are going to be dependent on having the same environment and stress, and situation every single night. It’s going to be something that grows and adapts to your brain activity, both on the millisecond level, as well as the long term. Across time, it’s learning and adjusting to your brain. That’s where we are now.
Thanks for sharing the backstory there. I love that you’re solving a problem for your own wife. This is a real-world solution to a real-world problem that your wife is facing. I’m assuming that your wife is using a prototype.
She is using every single prototype.
Exploring The Bia Sleep Mask
She’s a good tester. Because this is a brand new product and you’re a new startup company, our readers don’t know what a Bía Sleep Mask is. Can you walk us through the actual product itself and break that down a little bit?
We have a sleep mask here. We spent a ton of time. We paid attention to every detail, and I won’t go into the details of our zipper selection, for example, but it’s the mask itself. Generally speaking, the way sleep masks are made is that a vast majority of them are stitched. They stitch some fabric together in a certain shape and ship those out. A bit more advanced ones include foam. Most of those use die cutting as a manufacturing methodology. They take a square piece of foam, stamp a hole in it, wrap textile around it, and send it.
More advanced ones past that use something called a steel mold. You have a mold where the foam is being compressed and injected into a specific shape. The big advantage of steel mold is that you can do varying foam densities. For something like the nose area, where you have a variation in cheekbones, nose sizes, eyebrow ridges, having a very varying density foam allows it to be more comfortable for varying shapes. What we’ve done is a curved steel mold. We’re the only ones on the planet.
You can see it naturally sits on a curve here. The reason why we did that is to make sure it’s a 100% blackout for all head shapes, all sizes. No matter what it is, when the mask goes, you’re not going to have that creasing and that bending that creates channels and skin irritation that can pinch your skin. None of that’s going to happen. It is way more comfortable and way more blackout. The other major advantage is that we’re able to taper the foam in a much more precise way because we know exactly where the foam is going to lie on your head. It’s much more comfortable for side sleeping. That’s on the mask.
There’s a technology. We have incredibly powerful technology inside this mask. Let me preface this with you do not need any signal overnight with the mask. It operates completely signal-free. We do this for two reasons. One, a lot of people don’t like having an EMS or BMS while they’re sleeping or in their space. You won’t have any. The other reason is that it’s a much faster process. The neural feedback is instantaneous. We have Bluetooth. We have Wi-Fi. We have a very powerful chip on there. Our electronics board is eight times the size of an average wrist wearable. We have way more power in this.
What we’re doing is a closed-loop system. We measure, we improve, we measure, we improve. It’s constantly feeding back to itself every millisecond to death. We’re measuring great activity. We have four sensors in there. Essentially, what we’re doing is we’re measuring your brain activity. We’re measuring the brain because that’s where sleep happens. Where is your actual cognitive state? Based on what we measured, the stimulation changes.
You put on the mask, we measure, and we see your mind’s going 1,000 miles a minute. It’s racing. It’s got a big meeting tomorrow that it’s thinking about. We’re going to play back audio. That’s a bit more meditative and a bit more relaxed. The audio is designed by neuroscientists. The way the music vibrates your bones, vibrates the neurons inside your ears, and creates electrical signals inside your brain, the way that pattern fires, is going to create a meditative state inside your brain. It’s more or less activating that meditative state directly, by the act of hearing the music.
Listening to music while sleeping creates electrical signals to the brain that leads to a meditative state. Share on X
This is bone conduction. It’s not like headphones. That type of sound is bone conduction.
The connection speakers sit next to your eyes, closer to your cheekbones, so that there’s no hard parts of your ears where you’re sleeping. It’s more comfortable, but it drives straight to the bones in your ears and straight to the brain. That way, it’s vibrating a pattern. What you hear is soothing piano music, a little bit of ambient, but what’s happening inside your brain is that it’s getting its activation of that meditative state.
Your mind is going 1,000 miles a minute. We see you start to relax towards the meditative state. Our music is adapted. Every millisecond, it’s adapting. It’ll go from meditative, more down towards stage one sleep. Once we see you start to relax towards stage one sleep, we’ll adapt to stage two sleep. Once you fall asleep, the music does quiet down, but it will continue to work throughout the night. That way, you’re staying asleep, you’re getting more of that quality sleep, that deep sleep, and getting more of that rest and recovery. Set your alarm for 7:00 AM. Around 6:30, that means it’s going to start to become a bit more energized. It’s going to start to pull you out of that deep sleep and pull you into more of that awake, alert state.
There’s a sunrise inside the mask. In terms of the demos we’ve done so far, that is by far the most commented on aspect of it. Its gradual center has worked with thoughtful engineers. You’re getting that sunlight in your eyes. It’s a way more pleasant way to wake up instead of having your phone buzz on the nightstand. You rush over, you turn it off, and you see fifteen emails. You’re getting this pleasant sunrise experience, soothing music, slowly waking you up.
The music is binaural beats, essentially?
We have about twelve different techniques to use. Binaural beat is an aspect of it. Binaural beats are like only seeing yellow when you see the sunrise or the sunset, whereas we’re providing that entire color spectrum for your brain. We’re getting much more crisp data and much more crisp information for your brain, so you’re seeing the whole spectrum.
The mask is picking up the brainwaves. It’s saying, “Your brain is now sleeping.” It adapts. If you start to come out of sleep, for example, last night, I woke up in the middle of the night, my brain starts running, and I’m thinking about all the things on my calendar, this would have put me back to sleep before I even got there. Right?
Exactly. Objective one is preventing you from waking up fully. Objective two is that once you’re awake, it guides you back to sleep, so you can sleep again much faster.
Delving Into The Mask’s Results And Benefits
It sounds pretty amazing. It’s high tech and cool. What are some of the results? Can you walk us through that so our readers can know that?
To circle back to what I was saying earlier, people have twenty different solutions for their sleep. We did everything we possibly could to take proven, tested results. We’re not building a brand new, novel, completely untested methodology of how to improve sleep. We’ve taken everything out of the lab. We’ve miniaturized it, and we put it inside the system. In terms of seeing it all together in one go, we’re getting our beta program going now. The results you’re going to see are going to be everything combined.
What we have seen so far is that even wearing a sleep mask can improve your sleep pretty substantially. The Sunrise Alarm is a different product that you can buy for hundreds of dollars. They have great results. Neurofeedback for sleep is very heavily talked about. It’s hugely influential for improving your sleep. All the data you see is powerful. Specifically, regarding our mask, we don’t have that data yet, but we’re so confident it’s going to work. We have a 60-day money-back guarantee here. If you’re not seeing substantial, sustainable, and long-term results within 60 days, you get your money back.
It connects to an app so that people can see their sleep. You don’t need an Oura Ring anymore to measure your sleep because this is doing it for you.
A lot of our customers currently have some wrist wearable, ring, or something of the sort. We’ll get all that data and much more. We don’t focus on the data in the same way. We have quite a few pro athletes currently in the system here. One of our advisors has worked with pretty much every pro sports league in North America. One of the things for pro athletes is something called orthosomnia, which is essentially an obsession with your sleep data. You obsess over it to the point that you don’t sleep well.
Being told you didn’t get enough REM sleep last night, it’s not like, “Tonight, I’ll get more REM.” It’s not a choice. It’s not something you can control. It’s something we can influence with our mask. It’s not like you can consciously choose it. Showing you that you didn’t get enough REM is more or less telling you something you can’t do anything about, that there’s not much value to that. You can access that. We’re going to put it a little bit deeper, but what we focus on is, “What’s the best you can get out of your day today?” You have your sleep. Here’s where we think your energy is going to peak. Here’s where your ideal time to take a nap or focus on some recovery is. This is how you can have your best day today.
When it comes to looking at your sleep stats, we look more at your habits. For example, on the upside, part of your onboarding, we’re going to ask you, “What is your number one sleep challenge? What is the top thing you want to improve?” We’re going to have a few different questions to make sure everything’s lining up. We can do a bit of a before-and-after picture to show you that not only are we seeing improvements in the data, but you saw improvements in your own surveys from the beginning of the month to the end of the month. We’ll have a before-and-after picture for you.
Part of why we do all of that is to focus on things that you can control. When you say your top sleep challenges, for example, waking up in the middle of the night, let’s say you wake up ten times a night, we’re going to say, “Let’s get you to eight by the end of the month. By the end of the month, you can only wake up eight times. Here are the key things we want you to track. Alcohol.” We’ll give you four or five things.
We’re going to focus on how well you’re staying true to that plan. Is that something you can control and something you can do? The sleep data is a separate metric. It’s in the app. You’ll be able to see your overnight heart rate variability, your heart rate, and breathing rate. You’ll be able to see your sleep staging. All of that will be in there, a number of wake-ups and interruptions. It’s that we don’t want to have you focus on something you can’t control.
This is meant to be used every day. It’s not like, “I wear this on the overnight flight.” It’s every day.
You can use it for overnight flights. There are lights inside the mask. We have jet lag, so use it on flights while you travel. It’ll help. The advantage of using every day is that it’s learning what your ideal sleep pattern is. The more you use it, it’s learning what is good and what is bad for your sleep specifically. Let’s say, for you, you need seven hours and fifteen minutes. Hours 4 to 5 of deep sleep are your best possible sleep. That was when you were feeling your best the next day. You showed that you were most alert when you woke up in the morning. That is currently what we’re setting as an ideal sleep.
The next night, you get an even better sleep. It’s now adjusting that target. That sleep-safe guidance throughout the night is constantly learning, adjusting, and adapting. We’re moving more and more towards what is a great night’s sleep versus what is a bad night’s sleep for you as an individual. It’s constant learning and adapting. The more you use the mask, the better it’s going to get.
It’s learning my patterns and what works well for me as well. This sounds pretty amazing. What about people with sleep apnea? Are they still wearing a CPAP machine and this? Those are different things, but I’m curious what outcomes they could expect.
We’re a general consumer device. For something like sleep apnea, if you do not have it, we could theoretically say, “There are interruptions in your breathing rate. Go see a doctor. Get a proper diagnostic process in.” If you’re curious, you think you might have sleep apnea, we’d be able to give you that extra nudge to say, “Yes, definitely go see a doctor to get this looked at appropriately.”
For sleep apnea, what we suggest is that so long as your sleep apnea mask doesn’t have a part going up your nose to your forehead, if it’s going along the cheekbones or going on the side, like nasal pillows, even full face ones, this mask still works. I’ve tried it with both personally, trying to pick five different models of each. The mask is still 100% blackout. The audio still comes through. You’ve got to turn the audio up a little bit more because it’s a little bit more removed from your face, but everything still works out perfectly fine. That’s part of the design.
How has your wife been sleeping now that she has this mask, the Bía Neuroscience mask?
I’d love to say her sleep’s completely revitalized, but she’s a guinea pig. She’s doing the guinea pig stuff that no one else would be asked to. She’s trying everything under the sun. “We don’t think this will help. Let’s see if it doesn’t help.” She’s the one who gets to trial and test those out. She is seeing improvements, but she’s also part of the guinea pig crew here. Finding things that don’t work is part of the process.
What Happens In The Brain During Sleep
Sleep is a pillar of health and longevity, and it extends our health span. It’s not every day that we get to hear from or talk to a sleep expert. I have looked at some of Matthew Walker‘s research on why we sleep, but can you maybe explain for our readers and for me, too, what’s going on in the brain when we’re sleeping, and why it is so important?
Our sleep has been getting worse over time. In 1942, 11% of people were getting less than six hours of sleep. It’s in the middle of World War Two. In 2012, that number was closer to 44%. We’re getting worse at sleep.
Forty-four percent of people in the US are getting less than six hours of sleep a night.
We’re getting worse at sleeping. I bring that up because when you look at what’s happening inside the brain, and what the big difference has been, is we’re operating on a much higher level of stress now than we used to. If you look at something like exercise, it has become very much more at the forefront of health. When we stopped working on factory floors and farms as much and started sitting in chairs all day, it became pretty apparent. “We should probably be moving our bodies. We’re no longer doing that.”
We are getting worse at sleeping. We are operating on a much higher level of stress now than we were used to. Share on X
When we started doing mass production, global shipping of food, and pumped them all full of drugs to make sure the food could survive the journey, we started to realize, “Maybe we should start focusing a bit more on what we’re eating and not anything that would fit inside shrimp wrap and send it up.” That became more of the forefront. We’re now entering that stage of understanding on the sleep side, the third pillar of health here, where the gap is. A big problem we’re seeing is stress levels. A great example of this is something called the first-night effect.
I’m sure everyone here who has traveled before has felt this. The first-night effect is your first night in a new space when your sleep is substantially worse. If you look at pilots, for example, who have to travel all the time, it’s pretty common that they travel with a pillow. The reason why they do that is that it’s something familiar. It doesn’t feel like they’re completely in a new space every night. It’s something they know. They feel the comfort of the pillow. “My head knows this tactile experience.” It helps them sleep a little bit better. What’s happening during the first-night effect is that your brain is in a bit more of a “better flight stage.” It’s a bit more alert and a bit more on edge. “I don’t know this environment. I need to wake up a little bit more. I can’t go into that deep sleep because I need to be on edge.”
What I’m seeing now, especially with our phones right next to us all the time, our TVs in the bedroom, and even working from home, it creates that feeling of stress in your sleep environment that is causing issues and leading to bigger sleep issues. What’s happening inside the brain right now due to the bad sleep is that you haven’t had enough stress going through your brain. You’re not allowing your brain to go through the proper sleep architecture, go through the sleep cycles, and get that proper recovery and rejuvenation.
In a good sleep pattern, you’re relaxed, calm, and going to sleep. Your brain drifts from this active brain state to a relaxed meditative state, to this light stage-one sleep. A lot of people don’t know. It’s a light stage one sleep. You still feel very conscious. You’re aware of your thoughts, but you’re technically asleep during that state, which is pretty interesting.
Those are the different brainwave states. That would be described as a theta brainwave state.
These are very broad strokes, but generally speaking, beta is alert. You’ve got alpha, theta, and delta. These are broad spectrums I’m speaking to right now. They do get much more granular, but theta is more meditative. Theta is a bit more in stage one or stage two. Delta is going to be more in stage three round. It is a broad structure, but that’s generally what’s happening inside your brain.
The brainwaves are slowing down as we go into those stages.
A fun fact on that one, too, is what was fairly common with concussion when I worked in the neurofeedback clinic was a predominance of delta waves while someone was awake. They look like a reverse bell curve, with very active delta waves and beta waves. That’s where that brain fog comes a lot with a concussion.
It’s almost like they’re asleep, but they’re actually awake.
It creates this fogginess and this lack of clarity and sensitivity to bite.
That stage where we’re drifting off to sleep, it feels like we’re still awake. We’re still aware of our thoughts, but we’re actually sleeping.
It doesn’t feel like it, but you’re technically asleep during that stage. You’re not getting as much recovery as you should, but in that stage-one sleep, you’re still consciously aware of your thoughts. Your thoughts are jumping much more than they usually are. The firing of your neurons is a little bit more rhythmic. When you’re asleep, your neurons fire a bit more of a rhythmic pattern, where they’re firing in synchronicity. Whereas when you’re awake, it’s a scatterplot. It’s Times Square in New York, where everything’s going in every direction at all times. Whereas deep sleep is more like cars going through, going down the freeway, where it’s a little bit more synchronized. Everyone’s going to a similar pace, and it’s a bit more rhythmic.
What’s happening in our brains as we’re sleeping, and how is it being recovered, cleansed, and those types of things?
The best studied ones are stage three, which is deep sleep and REM. REM stands for rapid eye movement. Those are the two best-studied areas of sleep. Part of that is because they’re the most distinct, so it’s much easier for us to create associations. Part of it is cerebrospinal fluid that is pumped through your brain during stage three sleep. During deep sleep, from your spine, there’s a liquid called cerebrospinal fluid, cerebro being the brain. It is fluid between your central nervous system, your spine, and your brain. It starts pumping through your brain.
The reason why it’s doing this is like the garbage trucks cleaning up all the garbage around the street. It’s cleaning out all the dead neurons, anything that’s no longer usable. The fluid pumps through your brain, brings it all up, and goes back down. It’s part of why, if you wake up in the middle of deep sleep, you feel groggy because there’s liquid inside your brain.
The struggle people have with napping is waking up in the middle of a nap, and they have gone too deep into their nap experience. They started getting this liquid pumping through the brain that shouldn’t be pumping through the brain with that nap experience. We do have a nap program. It’ll prevent you from going that deep into sleep. We’ll do stage one or stage two, so you don’t wake up groggy. You get that bit of relaxation and recovery back to it.
Stage three is a bit more of a deep sleep. Generically speaking, that happens a bit more at the beginning of the night. You fall asleep. You get a bit more deep sleep. It’s generally more associated with physical recovery. It’s very important for athletes for muscle recovery, but generally more on the physical side, the mitochondria function a little bit more focused there. There’s REM sleep. REM sleep usually happens a bit later in the night. This is generic. Each person is going to have their own patterns and requirements. If you were to look at the bell curve distribution of people and their sleep patterns, the one or two standard deviations from the norm, you would have lots of deep sleep at the beginning of the night and lots of REM sleep at the end of the night.
REM sleep is a bit more, generally speaking, is more focused on cognitive recovery. That’s where the long memory formation happens. There have been quite a few studies that have shown that people who get more REM in their sleep will do better on memory tests than those who get less REM. To give people things to memorize before they go to sleep, those who got more REM would generally do better on the memory tests than this one.
That’s when we’re dreaming as well.
You can dream in other states as well. You can dream in stage two. You can dream in stage three sleep as well, but predominantly, it happens in REM. Another reason why it’s a very well-studied one is that there’s some level of conscious recall. If you wake someone up during REM, they’re more likely to be able to tell you what they were dreaming about.
Going back to the deep sleep, how much deep sleep do we need for that cerebrospinal fluid to do its job and cleanse everything out? Is it different for every person? On average, what’s a good amount?
That’s a difficult number to say because it completely varies depending on how much exercise you get and what that looks like. For example, often the recommendation for pro athletes, if they can, is to get after a game, nine-plus hours of sleep, so they can get at least two hours of deep sleep. Whereas, generically for most of us, if you went for a nice crisp walk, within that 67% of people, seven and a half to eight and a half hours of sleep is typically recommended. If you get an hour of deep sleep, that’s usually quite great.
My recommendation, especially with current wearables, is to focus on how you feel and then look at your sleep stats. Don’t tell them that the sleep stats tell you if you had a good night’s sleep. You tell the sleep stats if you had a good night’s sleep. Wake up feeling great. You’re feeling full of energy. You feel like your muscles are recovered after a workout the day before. Look at what your deep sleep looks like and what your REM looks like. If you had a big cognitive load day, use those to determine what was good in the stats, rather than the stats telling you if you’ve had a good rest.
Generally speaking, maybe we need around an hour of deep sleep. With your data that you’ve seen so far, for most people, they’re going to fall asleep faster using this technology and the mask. They’re going to have more minutes of deep sleep per night on average. Do you have some stats around that?
We focus on who we throw around as doubling on the deep sleep. Deep sleep is what suffers the most currently in the population. It’s the stage of sleep you’re least likely to get into during high-stress periods. That’s what’s usually suffering the most for people is doubling the amount of deep sleep.
With this mask, with this technology, we can essentially double the amount of deep sleep. That cerebrospinal fluid is going to do its job, take all the junk out of our brains that has built up and accumulated throughout the day, and cleanse it out. We’re going to wake up feeling a lot clearer and having more energy. Our brains are going to be healthier, essentially.
To touch on that example before with that first night effect of your brain, which is usually on that high alert during that stage, our music is going to take away that high alert, saying, “The door’s locked. The windows are closed. Be good, relax. There’s no tiger outside. We’re fine.” Your brain will get into that deep sleep stage, and we’re going to help hold you there for longer so that your brain is not on that alert for five minutes in deep sleep and waking up. We’re going to keep you in that deep sleep longer and allow your brain to do what it needs to do to be at its best.
The longer you are in deep sleep, the longer you can use your brain to the fullest. Share on X
It’s all coming together with the neural feedback saying, “These are the vibrations, the brainwave state that you’re in, and it’s going to make sure that you’re staying in the correct or the best brainwave state, that delta state.”
To provide the extra step of clarity, there are the neural soundscapes, the audio that mimics those brain states. There’s the adaptation of how they adapt based on your brain activity to help you get more of that rest. There’s a neural feedback coaching aspect going on here as well. It’s passive. You don’t need to actively think about anything. You put on the mask, your mind’s racing and starting to relax, but it starts thinking again about that meeting, and it starts to go back up and become more energized.
The music will adapt and adjust so that it’s giving cues to your brain, saying, “You’re going in the wrong direction here. You need to relax.” Once it starts going towards that relaxed state, it’s getting cues saying, “Good job. This is the direction you want to go.” The more you use it, the better it gets. The great thing about that is that the cues become recognized by your brain. The next time you wear it, it’s going to respond a bit quicker to it. They’ll get quicker and quicker. Right away, your brain’s going to start making some changes.
It gives you a little reward for doing a good job. Take me back to the napping protocol for a minute. If I’m feeling tired, I need to get a twenty-minute nap. You can have a protocol on the product, on the device, that will allow you to stay in stage one or stage two for twenty minutes. It’ll lead you to it, keep you there, and then bring you out.
If you select a nap program, we don’t want you to do this for two hours. It’s a completely different process. For a nap program, you only do it for twenty minutes. The music is going to have a sunset inside the mask to soothe you down and cue the brain through visuals as well to relax. The guidance is going to keep you in stage one and stage two sleep. The music, if you start to go too deep, is going to try to energize you again and pull you out of that deep sleep. You’re staying in that stage one, stage two range. You’re not getting too deep.
You’re not getting that grogginess after the nap. At the end of the nap, the final few minutes, there is a sunrise in the mask, and music is energizing. That beta range, that energized state music, is going to be more like that. It’s going to be like a hit of audio coffee there, to just, “Let’s get up. Let’s get moving. It’s time to get out there and get moving.” That’s going to be the wake-up experience from the nap.
How Bia Sleep Masks Help With Cognitive Impairments
I can see a lot of use cases for that. I have one other question about REM sleep. You mentioned that’s where the cognitive part comes in. With this technology and being able to enhance our deep sleep and also monitor our REM sleep, are we, in a sense, maybe preventing things like Alzheimer’s, dementia, and mild cognitive impairments? We’re protecting our brains in a way, too, through this technology.
For anything along those lines, we would need clinical studies to make any direct statement of, “Yes, this helps with that.” We don’t have those yet. Talk to your doctor if you have any concerns on that side, and see what they say in terms of what helps on this. Broadly speaking, sleep is a very crucial supporting pillar to your health across the spectrum, especially mental health. If you want to be at your mental best, if you want to have a sharp memory, you need to get great REM sleep.
Fun fact, we looked at cognitive enhancement devices when we first started, and looked at doing memory boosting before we went into neurofeedback for sleep. The crazy thing was when we started looking into that, we saw that the stats were showing a great REM sleep is going to be more important than any technology currently out there.
That’s the most important problem to solve.
If you want great memory, you want great sleep. They need to go hand in hand.
If you want great memory, you want great sleep. They need to go hand-in-hand. Share on X
This product is being launched. Do you foresee in the future other areas that this same technology will move into, like focus, meditation, or other things?
On the meditation side, there’s a company called Muse out there right now. They’re pretty good. Sens.ai is already on the meditation side. We’d love to get there eventually. It’s not where we’re focused. We’re 100% laser-focused that we’re going to give you the best sleep possible. We’re going to continue to build on that. We have a parking lot list of 75 items of new things we’re going to build and grow into all around sleep. Happy to promote other companies out there. Check out Muse. Check out Sens.ai. There are some pretty fantastic products on the meditation side.
Get Your Very Own Bia Sleep Mask
I think about my own wife, who doesn’t always sleep great, and the days that she does are amazing. On the days that she doesn’t sleep great, she gets headaches and doesn’t feel good. I can’t wait to get a mask for myself, but also for my wife. All this amazing technology sounds expensive, but I’m aware. Can you share a little bit about the cost, how our readers can get it, and things like that?
We’re in the pre-order phase right now. We’re entering that beta program. We’ve got 500 people testing the product. It is a huge beta program to make sure everything is going to be in tip-top shape with the best product on the market. It is a lifetime subscription with the pre-order, and it’s at $419. That price will go up, especially when we launch. We’re anticipating being closer to $499 when we fully launch, with a monthly subscription on it. The best deal you can possibly get is locking it in now.
If someone takes action now and gets one of these, it’s $419, and you have a lifetime subscription to the app. You never have to pay a monthly fee. It is a one-time cost of $420.
One time, you’re good. Don’t have to worry about checking your credit card.
Double your deep sleep for $420 for the rest. That’s a pretty good deal.
You need to wait a little bit longer with this being in the pre-order phase, when you’re not shipping the next day or anything, but you get a locked-in fantastic rate.
Get In Touch With Michael
Michael, this has been an amazing conversation. It was so enlightening. Sleep is such an important item for health, extending healthspan, longevity, for thriving in life in general, and having a healthy day-to-day life. Thank you so much for the amazing work that you’re doing. I’m excited for more people to experience the benefits of the work that you’re doing, myself included. Where can we find Bía Neuroscience?
The website is GetBia.com. On our website, we have pretty much everything on there. If you want to reach out to contact us, go to GetBia.com, or there’s a contact us link on that website. It goes straight to me. I handle all the customer inquiries directly. It’s important that I have that direct line of communication, and I know everything that’s happening on the customer side. You’ll speak to me directly if you reach out.
Thank you so much for your time. It’s an honor and a privilege to hear about this great work that you’re doing. I know it’s going to change a lot of people’s lives. Keep at it. I’m excited to see where all this is going to head.
Thank you so much for having me. This is a lot of fun.
Have a great day, Michael. Thank you.
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What a fascinating conversation with Michael. I hope you’re walking away with not only a deeper appreciation for the science of sleep but also a new level of hope for how technology, if and when used wisely, can help us live more fully, more consciously, and with more energy. Michael, thank you for sharing your story, your insights, and the powerful mission behind Bía Neuroscience.
It’s exciting to see a company blend neuroscience, innovation, and compassion to solve a problem that affects so many people, almost all of us. If you want to learn more about the Bía sleep device, then head over to GetBia.com. You’ll find all the details there, including how to try it for yourself or share it with a friend who could use better sleep and a longer, healthier life. Until next time, stay well, sleep deeply, and keep living fully alive.
