Switching Off with Sleepcasts
Kiri Miller
My article “Switching Off with Sleepcasts” is part of a larger research project on wellness apps and the attention economy. This case study focuses on the Headspace meditation app and its collection of sleepcasts, audio content designed to put listeners to sleep. Headspace’s guided meditations and sleepcasts are part of a burgeoning genre of audiocentric self-care products that present mindful listening as a pathway to managing anxiety, depression, insomnia, and the distractions of other digital media. Headspace, which claims over 70 million users of its app, has effectively used sleepcasts to extend media engagement and the productive labor of self-care beyond waking hours and past the threshold of consciousness. In glowing testimonials, reviewers write that they never know how a sleepcast ends, because they fall asleep before it’s over.
This project extends my previous theorization of “intimate media” (from my book Playable Bodies to encompass wellness apps. Like the motion-sensing videogame interfaces that were the subject of my previous research, meditation apps are designed to configure intimate relationships among bodies and technologies through repetitive practice and experimental trial and error. Where digital games present this process as interactive play, meditation apps frame it in terms of contemporary “wellness” discourse: self-care, self-knowledge, and self-control.
In the course of researching this article, I collected and analyzed 850 user reviews of the Headspace app and tracked discussion of Headspace sleepcasts on social media platforms to assess how users engage with wellness discourse in accounting for their own experience. I also consulted prior scholarship on theories of listening (especially in relation to mobile media); the sociology of sleep; the history of sleep medicine; and ethnographic work on Silicon Valley start-up culture—which helped me understand how Silicon Valley self-optimization discourse came to incorporate ideas from mindfulness meditation practices. These threads converge in the development of apps that promise to help users sleep-train themselves out of anxious insomnia by adopting a bedtime ritual of sonic self-care that relies on proprietary media content.
The Headspace sleepcast menu (app screenshot by Kiri Miller).