Sleep on TikTok to help viewers fall asleep easily
At 9 p.m. every night, 24-year-old Eliza Diaz goes to bed and starts a sleep live stream on TikTok. About 15 minutes later Diaz fell asleep and there were about 1,000 – 10,000 people staying to watch her sleep.
Many people think this is strange, but Diaz says she records such sleep live streams to help people who are struggling with insomnia fall asleep more easily. Like using the trick of seeing others do it to help you accomplish the same task. Viewers of Diaz say watching other people sleep also makes it easier for them to fall asleep.
Diaz, a tiktoker with 450,000 followers, first came up with the idea when she stumbled across a sleep live stream on TikTok over a year ago. Although she also struggles with insomnia, when Diaz watches such videos she quickly falls asleep easily. Since then, she has started streaming live videos of her bedtime every night.
Dr. David Spiegal, Vice President of Psychiatry at Stanford University Medical Center, and expert on sleep and hypnosis told Insider that humans are social creatures and easily empathize. In other words, seeing Diaz drowsy can also make you feel drowsy. This is like watching someone else yawn and you reflexively yawn too. “For me watching these livestreams makes sense that watching other people sleep can make it easier for you to get the same state,” said Dr.
The doctor also describes insomnia as a person’s internal response to their environment and how they manage that environment. To fall asleep, you need to keep your surroundings free from loud noises, bright lights or all sorts of things that can wake you up like drinking or exercising right before bedtime.
Instead, to make it easier to fall asleep, you should take a warm bath, watch a slow-motion movie, or watch someone else fast asleep in a quiet room.
Spiegal thinks that if you’re using the sleep livestream method to fall asleep easily, you need to lower the screen light. “As long as you don’t get too much light into your eyes, this is one of the ways to get rid of insomnia.”
Make a lot of money from the sleep livestream trend
Similar to Eliza Diaz, every 10pm, Jakey Boehm, who owns a TikTok channel with 1 million followers, wears pajamas, climbs into bed, and sleeps in front of audiences from all over the world who are watching via TikTok Live. He revealed that he earns an average of $35,000 per month from fans. It is estimated that a year he can earn an income of 420,000 USD (9.9 billion VND) from sleeping livestream.
More creatively, viewers can buy him virtual gifts, which have the ability to emit sounds and lights in Boehm’s bedroom to try to wake him up. It’s like the experience of playing a game and Boeham is a character in the game and the audience is the gamer and the challenge is to awaken.
For about $380, a viewer can activate anything in Boehm’s bedroom in 5 minutes.
This trick attracted Kyle Hirshon, a 25-year-old television producer. He said watch videos in the morning, before going to work. “I saw him sleeping on the bed, next to a screen. People did all sorts of things to wake him up and I was like ‘oh, that looks fun’.” Occasionally, Hirshon also sends Boehm virtual gifts.
The money collected from fans is saved by Boehm to buy houses and support mental health charities. He said his life has changed thanks to sleeping on TikTok. He is also a freelance web developer himself.
Tiktok also enjoys a percentage of virtual gifts, although the Chinese company did not disclose the exact number.
According to the WSJ, footballer David Beckham kicked off the era of watching others sleep, four decades after Warhol’s “Sleep.” In a project serving the national gallery, Beckham went topless and slept in the 107-minute “David” video in 2004.
Sleep streaming became more famous thanks to Amazon’s Twitch livestream service and spread to Tiktok last year. However, also because of the seemingly easy way to make money, many scammers have appeared. According to YouTube content creator Patrick Moore, these guys use the comment feature during the livestream to trick the child audience into sending them money. As a result, streamers like Olson now have to display their account number right on the board in the video.