Big Health (Sleepio & Daylight) Reviews 

If I could rate 0 stars I would. Recommended by my NHS GP when I complained of insomnia that was having a severe impact on my life. It does not work for clinical sleep issues at all. It was patronising, and frustrating. The tips were not helpful at all. I can only see this might be any use if you needed to be told to get into a regular routine, or to calm your thoughts. There we are- I saved you the bother of this awful awful app. I cannot believe this sort of nonsense is endorsed by the NHS and NICE. This is clinical laziness, negligence- and a clear cost saving exercise.

I have suffered from chronic insomnia for years. Their whole setup is ridiculous. They don't care if you have deep sleep, REM sleep...if you just doze they think it's great. And my time in bed is a stupid long time. Their technique is stupid, the app is stupid. I can't believe they actually try to charge people!

Nothing about this could truly be considered to be “therapy” - I have completed the programme and can confirm that it doesn’t even follow standard CBT-I protocols. I am astounded that the NHS in Scotland is somehow paying MILLIONS for this app. What an absolute waste of taxpayer’s money. You should be ashamed of yourselves Sleepio.

Had sleep issues for over 6 years so thought I'd give Sleepio a go. I've just finished week 2 and I can honestly say I have had huge improvements in my sleep. I went from 43% score to averaging around 90%. Right from the start I took on board some of the suggested changes ,eg no caffeine 6hrs before bed,eating dinner 3hrs before bed,breathing meditation, no TV or social media 30 minutes before bed,thought blocker exercise which works really well and wearing an eye mask as I don't like a dark room. Week 2, sleep restriction week was hard but it works, timings on my schedule were wrong and there was no way to amend them, I did have to go to bed well before the suggested bedtime as I couldn't keep awake but fell asleep as soon as I went to bed. I have had to get up on one occasion due to being awake for more than 15 minutes but that's all part of the process. I do still wake several times a night but by doing the thought blocker im normally back asleep in 5 minutes. I'm surprised at so many negative comments, I can only assume people think the app itself is going to do the work for them. In order to make the change you need to be open to making changes to your bedtime routine and that includes the sleep restriction, which won't last forever. I highly recommend the app if you use it with a positive mindset

Dr told me to try. Managed to last a few weeks before giving up a pointless task. The app asks
What time did you go to bed-easy enough to answer. Now here is where it gets difficult. What time did you fall asleep at. How many times did you wake up during the night and how long was it before you fell asleep again. Who on earth can answer this when you wake up a few times per night. So you start guessing and the app congratulates you because it says you got 3 hours sleep tonight rather than the previous night. I wonder how much cash was wasted making the Sleepio app. In my opinion a total waste of my time which only stressed me out because I was guessing rather than entering correct Information.

Unable to use as says not Available in my Area. Contacted the app tech support and told that's correct it is not available under my local NHS which is Cambridgeshire.

So my PCMHS tell me it is available but in actual fact it is not according to Big health.

However they say if I write to my MP to request that they lobby for my areas NHS to pay for people in my area to use the app then they would give me free access to the app once I share a response that I contacted my MP.

This I am not happy to do, and also not happy with the information the app would be requesting.

Also now I have seen the other reviews I am suspicious of the whole app to be honest.

It congratulates me for sleeping for 2 hours and getting up. Absolutely pointless that it only focuses on efficiency and not on actually getting enough sleep!

I could not log in. It didn't seem happy that I didn't want to set up a passkey and would not go beyond that point. I did not want to sign my google account or any other account up to access the tech support don't see why I should give all this info and access to an app. After reading the other reviews I am not going to bother to try anymore.

I registered for this website, but I could never log in with the password I used during setup. The tech support was terrible—the link to change my password required me to enter the original password, which made no sense. It was a frustrating chicken-and-egg situation that left me unable to even try the service. The entire process is almost as stressful as dealing with sleep deprivation.

It is impossible to restrict sleep to this extent and to function. By 11 am I am jibbering because I am so tired I can not think. I can not possible do my yoga classes, so I am getting unfit. I am eating constantly for energy. So, I am putting on weight and I have been a size 10-12 uk my entire life. So it is having many n egative effects. Obviously it is impossible to work in any meaningful manner. I would not wish to make a decision while in this state. Also I feel that really it only addresses people who can't fall asleep, not those who like myself wake up in the middle of the night and can not get back to sleep. Getting up at 3 am is completely counter-productive. It is cold and I feel more and more irritable. I can see how it COULD work, but one would have to be in a hotel with no outside demands to get through this in an y meaningful way. I am not going to sacrifice yoga, decent dog walking and being normal weight for something that has a realtively low chance of success. Ialso HATE the graphics. They seem designed for 2 year old children

I am only in my third week of Sleepio, having been requested to try it by my doctor. I am too tired to do anything during the day due to having to get out of bed if I am not asleep (restricted sleep strategy). I would not be happy if I had to drive or do anything imortant during the day. I can't see that this will improve. As I have had interrupted sleep for more than thirty years I know quite a lot about the problem and don't find the advice useful. I am affected by changing weather and atmospheric pressure, which is not addressed.

GP recommended this to me. I had already done Sleepstation several years back and found that unless I stick rigidly to what is basically a very short time in bed to force sleep, there's no difference in how I sleep.
And it's so horrible to have to stay awake longer than normal folk AND get up really early every day to basically exhaust yourself so that you sleep in one block.
Anyway, it was at least a better experience than Sleepio (it cost a lot more) in terms of logging in, presentation, content, feedback and support. The tech support tried to help but I can only log in online.

The goal of Sleepio is NOT to increase the amount of time you sleep for. The goal is to "increase" sleep efficiency (time asleep divided by total time in bed) to 90% by decreasing the amount of time you spend awake in bed. You have to get out of bed if you've been lying awake for 15 minutes. If you take 15min to fall asleep, sleep for only 4 hours 20min then lie awake for 15min before getting out of bed (not unusual for me) then you have a sleep efficiency of 90% and Sleepio congratulates you on your success. My sleep efficiency was already above 90% before I began the course, but Sleepio continued to plough on with its own goal of "increasing" my sleep efficiency to 90%. There was never any mention of increasing sleep duration, which was my goal. I read the results of Sleepio's clinical trial and discovered that at the end of the Sleepio course the insomnia patients were only sleeping for 5 hours 46 min per day! And the Sleepio treatment increased time asleep by less than other GP treatments! But Sleepio chooses to focus only on sleep efficiency, which has no meaning for me.

The course is delivered by an animated "Prof" who I felt extremely patronized by. If he was a real person I would either ask him to stop or I would walk away and avoid him in future. But I felt unable to walk away because my GP prescribed this. The Prof told me to change my negative attitudes to sleep and insomnia (which I don't have - I love sleep and even insomnia has some benefits), that I shouldn't feel so alone and isolated (which I don't), that I have to stop worrying (I wasn't), etc. During every session you get multiple choice questions to test that you've been paying attention. When you get the answer right (they are patronisingly easy), you still have to listen to the Prof explain it again, as though you had got it wrong.

For anyone with sensory processing issues Sleepio is a nightmare of animation plus audio plus subtitles that can't be turned off plus detailed multiple choice questions and written information that all occur at the same time. I didn't know which one I was supposed to be focusing on.

Sleepio did absolutely nothing to help me sleep for longer each night and I cannot recommend it.

The first weeks (!!) are wasted with tracking sleep and very general 'sleep hygiene' advice that surely most with a severe sleeping problem have explored in great detail (expect no change here, but unskippable videos with a cartoon professor mansplaining things). In my experience, by the time the only valuable help, sleep restriction, is applied, I may have given up on this. I tried restriction on my own before the programme told me. Further, there's no differentiation between interrupted sleep and problems falling asleep, which makes it at times sound it only serves the latter. Overall the approach is very rigid and the tone is patronising. Checking someone's knowledge and failed approaches to better sleep initially, and then starting where needed could have saved weeks of struggle. Sleep restriction worked for me, but it is hard to tell whether this was thanks to or despite Sleepio.

Not for everyone as it claim's to be - for insomnia, maybe useful if you've never spent hours online looking into sleep hygiene and inane tips for improvement. For day time fatigue, interrupted sleep, longer term issues, adults above 16, no. The score tracking of sleep diary makes no sense, if you waste a day with 12 hours of interrupted poor quality sleep that's apparently a 93% efficiency score... righhht.

Can't log in on the webpage nor on the app. Completely and utterly useless and even the log in pages are badly designed. Must have been done by the YTS lad. No wonder the NHS have partnered with them. They're also useless.

Tough going at first with the sleep deprivation part (i.e. not being able to go to bed until a certain time, which initially was 3am in my case, and making sure not to nap outside of the permitted sleep window) but it did help to a point; that point being the course duration, beyond which it just becomes merely a diary for your continued sleep pattern following what the course has guided you to do, including a ridiculous automated never ending opportunity to add 15mins weekly to your sleep window; I stopped adding the 15mins at reaching a 12 hours sleep window, from which at best I got up to a 7hrs average total sleep per day (from about 3hrs before I started the course) yet this average at times does still fall back to lower than this, plus still waking on average about three occasions during my sleep (so the course did not stop the interrupted aspect with my daily sleep) but even when contacting Sleepio about this never ending automated adding of 15mins each week they merely acknowledged this as a flaw in the program and expected program users to realise this flaw and ignore the automated opportunity to keep adding 15mins each week at a certain point if your progress was good and this was still nonsensically being offered. My other more major disappointment is after a year of daily entering all the required sleep data from each night’s sleep, without warning I found myself locked out of the program as, it transpires, Sleepio only allow users access to it for a year, which was frustrating as consequently that year’s data of my sleep pattern became unavailable to me. Given Sleepio was recommended to me by my GP to aid tackling my sleep problems, it does make me wonder if there is a better Sleep app out there the NHS should instead be recommending. One other problem I found with the program was how to be certain of what time I actually fell asleep for this data entry requirement, as it’s difficult to clock watch right up to the nearest 15mins before falling asleep; I eventually overcame this by using a separate free sleep recorder app I found elsewhere to monitor snoring/teeth grinding/breathing to better pinpoint when I actually fell asleep (plus establish if snoring and/or teeth grinding and/or possible sleep apnea were problems for me regarding why my sleep is self-interrupted; none of these possible symptoms were a problem but at least this addition helped me be more accurate regarding when I actually fell asleep each day and the number of occasions per night I woke up).

Right from the very first day Sleepio helped me sleep better.

Didnt help at all
Couldnt see the point of it, weekly cartoon video to watch, avoid caffeine etc, as a chronic insomniac I know this already 😡 Condescending voice on video.
Daily sleep diary had to be input manually as couldnt link to Apple watch, found this very frustrating.
Did not benefit me at all, waste of time and effort

Completed this course, stuck by the rules and I had no improvement in my sleep!! You are given basic tips such as no caffeine, write worries down before going to bed etc etc. All the things most insomniacs know. The main core of the course is the use of sleep restriction so that you’re so worn out that you will eventually sleep.

The sleep restriction causes anxiety and if you’re not asleep within 15 minutes you are told to get up and do an inane task such as clearing a out drawer - pleazzze !!! The restriction is usually 5 hours. You have to sleep in those allotted 5 hours and if not you’re advised to get up.

There are no professionals on there to speak to nor is it being monitored by any professionals. There’s a weekly chat session with a psychiatric doctor but it’s just a posting message type of thing. The answer I got to my question wasn’t very fulfilling. The whole thing is run by the community of people on the course itself. There is one particular participant on there and she works really “hard”trying to support students and gives lengthy messages with tips and strategies. She has been a user, completed the course and is successfully maintaining. From what I’ve read mainly is that unless you stick to the sleep restriction for life your insomnia will come back.

My sleep remained the same for the whole time with no improvement even tho I used all the tips and tools given to me. At the end of the week you are set goals and the programme assess your sleep diary for the completed week. A computer generated “professor” with an irritating voice tells you at the end of the week that “you’re doing so well your sleep efficiency is up!!! Really I hadn’t noticed I must have blinked and missed it! Mine stayed the same.

I wouldn’t recommend this course unless you know nothing about sleep hygiene, only have mild sleeping problems and like tidying up drawers at 2am in the morning.

I suspect the NHS has paid a fortune for this rubbish programme.

I’ve tried it and completed it but unfortunately it’s not one size fits all. Maybe it’d work for you.