Tag tonight. See what actually moves YOUR BRI.

The advice you've already heard

Sleep on your side. Don't drink before bed. Lose 10 pounds. Try a wedge pillow.

I heard all of these. I tried most of them. Some helped. Some didn't. I had no way to tell which was which — except by guessing.

That's the problem with sleep advice. It's all true on average. But you're not an average.

30 seconds before bed. The rest takes 14 nights.

Tap what's true tonight. It takes about as long as setting an alarm. Six things that might be hurting your sleep:

🍷 alcohol  ·  ☕ late caffeine  ·  😰 stress  ·  🍽️ large meal  ·  💊 a new medication  ·  🏃 a hard workout

And six things you might be trying:

🛌 side-sleep  ·  📐 elevated head  ·  👃 nasal spray  ·  🪶 anti-snore pillow  ·  😷 CPAP  ·  🧘 wind-down routine

You sleep. SomniSense listens. The next morning your BRI lands in the report alongside the tags you set.

After 14 tagged nights, the Pro Factor Impact view groups your nights by tag and shows the average difference each factor made — for you, not the average user.

Tagging is in the free tier forever. Factor Impact (the analysis after 14 nights) is Pro. The split exists because tagging costs us nothing; running the analysis on the backend does.

What your night-14 report tells you (that nobody else can)

Here's what one Lab Member's data showed after a fortnight of honest tagging:

Alcohol moved this person's BRI by 3.2 events per hour. Side-sleep moved it down by 5.1. They didn't quit drinking — they cut weeknight wine. They didn't start side-sleep training cold — they sewed a tennis ball into a t-shirt for two weeks until it became habit.

The data didn't tell them what to do. It told them what was true for them. They decided what to do with that.

What I tested on myself, in case it's useful

Every body is different — that's the whole point of running it on yourself. But people ask, and saying "everyone's different, run the experiment" without a starting point feels evasive. So here's what I learned on my own data.

The four habits that mattered most for me, in rough order of impact:

1. Side-sleep, deliberately. The single biggest lever. In a clinical comparison I helped run, deliberate side-sleeping reduced events by about 50% on average for people under BMI 30. For me personally it was the difference between an apnea-heavy night and a clean one. A tennis ball sewn into the back of a t-shirt is more durable than positional pillows; both work.
2. No nicotine within 6 hours of bed. I'm a former smoker, and even shifting timing — not the total — moved my events down. Nicotine reduces blood-oxygen carriage and keeps the brain alert past the point you'd otherwise be falling asleep. The "calming cigarette" feeling is real for the smoker; the data shows the body is doing the opposite.
3. Alcohol kept under ~20% of my drinking ceiling. Not zero. Just modest. Above that line, the body spends the night metabolizing instead of resting. Around 4–6 hours after a heavy drink your body finishes processing it and you wake up — the part most people don't connect to the wine they had.
4. No hard workout within 3 hours of bed. Counter-intuitive: looks healthy, but the muscle fatigue after late exercise relaxes the airway exactly the way alcohol does. I moved my workouts to 5 p.m. and the difference showed up within a week.

Four habits. None original. The reason they actually stuck was that I could see, on my own data, which ones were doing the work.

What this is — and isn't (don't oversell it to yourself)

• Observational, not controlled. No randomization, no blinding, no placebo. If you tagged "side-sleep" and your BRI dropped, side-sleep might not be the only cause — maybe you also drank less that night.
• 14 nights is the minimum, not the magic number. Some patterns need 30 nights to surface. Some are obvious in 5.
• Bodies vary. Side-sleep helps a lot of people. It might not help you. The data tells you quickly enough that you don't waste 6 months on an intervention that isn't working.
• Not a substitute for a sleep specialist. If your BRI runs above 15 consistently, that's a clinic conversation. We give you the data to bring; we don't tell you what to do with it.