We started this because the existing material was either too shallow or too inaccessible.

How this started

i8hour was registered in Nottingham in 2021 by Clara Osei-Bonsu, who had spent the previous three years working in a university sleep research unit and found herself explaining the same things to friends and colleagues over and over — why they were tired despite sleeping enough, what actually happens with caffeine, why their sleep got worse after having children even when they had the same total hours.

The explanations were long and needed diagrams. The existing public resources were either aimed at clinicians or had been so simplified that the mechanism — the part that makes the advice make sense — had been stripped out.

Marcus Andriessen joined shortly after to cover the circadian side, which had been his research focus at Leeds. The project stayed deliberately small: two writers, no advertising, no product partnerships. The only incentive is to explain things correctly.

What we cover and what we don't

i8hour writes about the biology of sleep and wakefulness: how sleep architecture works, how the circadian system functions, how molecules like adenosine and cortisol mediate energy and fatigue, and how environmental factors like light and temperature interact with those systems.

We don't cover sleep supplements (beyond explaining the biology of whatever compound is being discussed), fitness recovery protocols, or anything that requires commercial relationships to write about honestly. We don't publish content we couldn't stand behind in a research context.

The dispatches are written to be useful to someone who is curious about the mechanism, not just looking for a checklist. If you want seven tips for better sleep, there are better places for that. If you want to understand what "better sleep" actually means physiologically, this is the right place.

What "i8hour" means

The name comes from the eight-hour sleep recommendation — which is both broadly correct and frequently misunderstood. Eight hours is a population average, not a target. Individual variation in sleep need is substantial, and the fixation on total duration obscures what actually matters: the structure and timing of sleep, not just the quantity. The name is a reference to that conversation, and a small provocation to look past the number.