It's 3am. You're doing maths on how much sleep you have left, and underneath it
all sits the quiet worry that something is wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you.
Half your brain stays on watch in an unfamiliar room, because a strange place used to be the
most dangerous thing there was. Your body reaches its coldest point around three in the morning
and takes your sense of proportion down with it — which is why the same problem is just a task
by nine. You wake a minute before your alarm because your body started preparing an hour
earlier; it would rather wake you gently than let something startle you.
None of that is a fault. It's equipment built for a world with no locks, no roofs and no
clocks, still running in a bedroom.
Still Awake exists to tell you which one is happening to you.
Not to soothe you. There are plenty of apps that will whisper at you until you drift off.
This one explains — because the fear of lying awake does more damage than the lying awake, and
that fear runs entirely on not knowing.
So: a two-minute test that tells you what's actually keeping you up. Straight answers about
what your body is doing. Sound and a timer for when you need them. No lullabies, no wellness
talk, no promises we can't keep.
There's a reason you're awake.Let's find yours.
Who's behind this
It's one person. Hello.
My name is Hidde, and I built Still Awake on my own — the questions, the writing,
the sounds, the site you're reading this on. There's no company behind it, no investors,
nobody paying me to recommend anything, and nothing here is sold on to anyone.
I'm not a doctor and I'm not a sleep scientist, and I'm not going to pretend
otherwise. What I do is read the research properly and put it into words that still make
sense at three in the morning. When something is genuinely established, I'll say so. When
it's the best guess anyone has, I'll say that too — there's a lot of confident nonsense
written about sleep, and I'd rather be the boring one who tells you what we don't know.
I also make the short videos you might have arrived from. Same idea, thirty seconds
instead of a page: here's the strange thing your body does, and here's why.
I started this because the not-knowing is the worst part of lying
awake, and that part is fixable by one person with a laptop. So that's what I'm doing.