TikTokers are livestreaming themselves sleeping to help viewers with insomnia — and some are making big money off the practice

• TikTokers are livestreaming themselves sleeping at night to help viewers combat insomnia.
• Eliza Diaz and Duane Olson say they earn as little as $1 from the livestreams but others make thousands.

Have you ever slept with a stranger? It's become a regular habit for some TikTokers.

At 9 p.m. every night, 24-year-old Eliza Diaz gets into bed and starts recording a TikTok livestream. About 15 minutes in, Diaz drifts off to sleep, and anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 people — the vast majority strangers — stay on to watch them dream. (Diaz uses they/them pronouns.)

It's may seem like the stuff of horror movies for some, but Diaz says they record sleep livestreams to comfort people and to help users struggling with insomnia fall asleep more easily. Like the body-doubling productivity hack popular on the app, users say watching someone else sleep can help them doze off, too.

Diaz, who has 475,000 followers, first got the idea to sleepfluence when they stumbled across a sleep livestream on TikTok over a year ago. Though they also struggle with insomnia, Diaz fell peacefully asleep while watching. They've been making their own streams almost every night since.

Sleepfluencers' sleepiness could be contagious.

There aren't specific studies on sleepfluencers' impact on insomnia, but there are a couple of reasons why they may work, Dr. David Spiegal, the associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford University Medical Center, who specializes in sleep and hypnosis, told Insider.

As Spiegal points out, we're social creatures, and we're hardwired to empathize. In other words, seeing Diaz feel sleepy could make us feel sleepy, too. It's kind of like watching another person yawn and responding, automatically with a mirroring yawn. "It makes sense to me," Dr. Spiegal said, "that watching someone else sleep could give you cues to get into a similar frame of mind."

And their content is extremely calming.

Dr. Spiegal describes insomnia as a person's internal response to their environment, and how they manage that environment. To get to sleep, the average person needs to "restrict their tendency to arousal," Spiegal said — meaning, avoiding loud noises, bright lights, and all the other things that wake your body up, like exercise or drinking alcohol. Instead, it's better to experience peaceful, pleasant things — a warm bath, a slow movie, or maybe watching a person falling asleep in a quiet, dark, calm room.

The fact that this sleep-ified strain of "slow TV" is arriving to viewers through the dim glow of a cellphone isn't a major issue, Spiegal thinks, even if he usually recommends people don't use screens before bed. "As long as you're not getting a heavy dose of light in your face," he explained, "that's probably not terrible."

Filming sleepstreams, Diaz told Insider, also helps sleepfluencers combat their own insomnia, potentially because they're sticking to a peaceful, consistent schedule and because they're not technically on their phone right before bed — it's filming them, but they're not scrolling.

Sleepfluencers create an unusual community that exists separately from them.

While Diaz sleeps, viewers watch and talk amongst themselves.

As they fall asleep, Diaz might ask viewers for input on the ambiance— what color the background lights should be, what music they should play — and responds to comments verbally before they fall asleep.

But Diaz's viewers typically get impatient after 15 minutes or so of chatting.

"'Where's the sleep? Where's the sleep?'" Diaz said viewers start asking. And if Diaz misses a night, their regulars get "really upset;" telling Diaz they couldn't sleep without them.

Duane Olson, a 25-year-old sleepfluencer in New York with 13,000 followers, said he will scroll and screen record his livestream so he can read the comments when he wakes up. Occasionally, he'll respond to them directly, like the comment reading, "Wake up! There's a spider crawling towards your ear."

There's big money in 'interactive' sleep streams. Not so much for peaceful streams.

In contrast to sleepfluencers who earn $400,000 per year by inviting their viewers to play God — paying to disturb the creator's sleep with cacophonous noises or jarring light displays — Diaz and Olson make next to nothing off of their peaceful streams.

Instead, Diaz's revenue comes from sponsorships with related companies.

Olson told Insider he earns about $1 per night, on average, for a sleepstream. Users send him money via Venmo or TikTok gifts. (Olson told Insider he's had an issue with interlopers trying to scam his viewers, soliciting donations to unaffiliated Venmo accounts. He told Insider he first started displaying his Venmo as a way for them to spot fakes). Occasionally, friends of Diaz or Olson will pop in to help moderate their chats for spam or scams. Some viewers leave alarming or overtly sexual comments, but Olson isn't particularly bothered.

A calm, "Mr. Rogers-type of guy," Olson said he's glad that his peaceful sleepstreams can help people fall asleep. But, for him, being a sleepfluencer is most enticing in its function as an absurd dinner party trick. A stage actor by day, Olson sees sleepstreaming as meme-culture performance art, as absurd as Marcel Duchamp's famous "Fountain" sculpture (a porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt).

"In a weird, inexplicable way," Olson said, "it's flattering. I mean, when I wake up, and I see that over 10,000 people have watched me sleep, I think, OK, I'm doing something right."

For now, "doing it for the bit" is acceptable compensation for a slightly worse night of sleep.

Olson and Diaz both say they plan to continue livestreaming their slumber. Diaz wants to expand further into mental health-related content — the tips and tricks they like to talk about before their viewers usher them to bed — and Olson is looking into less obnoxious features people might pay for, like changing his sound machine.

Eventually, he anticipates, the performance art joke will go stale. And, when it does, the regulars who've grown attached to Olson will have to shop around for another sleepfluencer to go to bed with.

Email tips on all things internet to mleighton@insider.com.