Can We Engineer Better Sleep? | Thermoregulation, Menopause & the Future of Bedding | Lara Smith, Founder and CEO, LUSOMÉ

Send us Fan MailWe spend roughly a third of our lives in bed. But what if the sheets, pajamas and bedding surrounding your body aren't just making you comfortable - what if they're actually affecting your physiology and your sleep?Today we're going to explore a surprisingly important question: can what we wear - and what we sleep on - actually change the quality of our sleep?Lara Smith is Founder and CEO of LUSOMÉ ( https://lusome.com/ ), an award-winning technical luxury brand that developed moisture-management technology for women's sleepwear and has since expanded into temperature-regulating bedding and other sleep products.Lara's journey into this space began with a deeply personal experience. Her younger sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and experienced debilitating night sweats during treatment. Lara couldn't find sleepwear that was both effective at managing moisture and temperature and something a woman would actually want to wear - so she decided to build it herself.What began as a personal problem became a technology and consumer-products company that has now been selling globally for more than a decade.Lara brings an unusual combination of experience to the conversation. Before founding LUSOMÉ, she spent years in the apparel and retail industry, including senior executive roles overseeing major women's apparel businesses and developing growth strategies for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales. She was also a finalist for the Canadian EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award in 2018.But what makes her particularly interesting for us today is what happens when textile technology meets human biology.LUSOMÉ's cooling bedding was recently evaluated in a peer-reviewed study involving researchers from Harvard Medical School's Division of Sleep Medicine and Brigham and Women's Hospital. The study analyzed more than 2,600 nights of sleep and reported an average increase of approximately 26 minutes of sleep per night, improvements in sleep quality, and elimination of night sweats for a subset of participants.So today we're going to go beyond the products and ask some bigger questions:What actually happens to the human body when we overheat during sleep? Can manipulating the tiny thermal environment between our skin and our bedding measurably change sleep? Why are night sweats so common during menopause and certain medical treatments? And could the future of sleep involve intelligent materials and personalized environments that actively respond to our physiology?Lara is also the co-founder of SheWorth, a social-impact brand and mental-health platform focused on women's worth, and hosts The Sweaty Pillow ( https://www.thesweatypillow.com/ ), where she speaks with physicians, researchers and experts in women's health, sleep and longevity.Exclusive 25% off Discount Code for Progress, Potential, And Possibilities community -POTENTIAL25 #SleepScience #SleepHealth #Thermoregulation #Menopause #NightSweats #HotFlashes #WomensHealth #SleepTechnology #SleepBetter #TextileTechnology #Longevity #HealthTechnology #Cancer #CancerTreatment #Innovation #Science #FutureOfHealth #FutureOfSleep #Biotechnology #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show