The good people at Pokémon want to help you sleep better and be entertained while doing it
Pokémon is entering the wellness market.
At a press conference in Tokyo in 2019, The Pokémon Company CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara announced a number of upcoming products and features from the company, one of which is a new mobile app – Pokémon Sleep.
Pokémon Sleep hopes to transform sleeping into entertainment, rewarding people for resting in a similar way to which the original 2016 Pokémon Go app incentivised people to go outside and walk around.
With stats suggesting that people are not getting the eight hours of sleep the body needs to function at an optimal level – in 2018, a study found that in the UK the average person gets six hours and 19 minutes of sleep, while a CDC study reported that more than a third of American adults are not getting enough sleep – this comes at a much needed time.
“Exploring the real world was one of the themes of Pokémon Go,” said Ishihara at the conference. “We believe we were able to take the simple human act of walking and turn it into entertainment for many people around the world.”
“After walking we decided to focus on the act of sleeping. Everyone spends a large part of their life sleeping and turning that into entertainment is our next challenge at Pokémon.”
We’re pleased to announce the development of Pokémon Sleep, a new app from @Pokemon_cojp that tracks a user’s time sleeping and brings a gameplay experience unlike any other!
— Pokémon (@Pokemon) May 29, 2019
Several Snorlax were consulted on this, in case you were wondering. #PokemonSleep is coming in 2020. pic.twitter.com/nJ7mJY09Dl
Turning resting into gameplay, users will be rewarded for the time they spend asleep during which a range of yet-to-be-determined activities will happen in their game. Ishihara says the company wants people to look forward to waking up every morning.
“[It will] transform the time spent sleeping at night into something more fun and enriching for everyone,” added Kazuhiro Maruyama, a representative from Nintendo who will be teaming up with Pokémon to create a sleep-tracking device. While John Hanke, CEO of another partner Niantic, said they were “excited to find ways to reward good sleep habits in Pokémon Go as part of a healthy lifestyle.
While the fact that Pokémon is encouraging children (and adults) to lead healthy lifestyles is great, it does beg the question – what does it say about us as a society that we need to be given fun incentives in order to complete the simple human tasks of walking and sleeping?
Now, almost four years since its announcement, Pokémon Sleep has finally been released.
An introduction video talks users through how to use the app. The app begins with users on an island where they encounter the sleeping Pokémon Snorlax and Professor Neroli, a scientist who is researching the sleep patterns of different Pokémon.
In order to use the app, users must set a sleep timer on the app and leave the phone by their pillow overnight. Pokémon Sleep will then measure, record and analyse your sleep, which will be categorised into one of three different sleep types. Depending on your sleep type, different species of Pokémon will gather around the Snorlax. The more you sleep, the more Pokémon will gather, which you can log in your ‘Sleep Style’ Pokédex.
Pokémon Sleep is available to download from the App Store for iOS and Google Play for Android around the world now.
[Editor's note: this article was originally published 30 May 2019 and has been updated 19 July 2023 to include information regarding the launch of Pokémon Sleep]