I Tried a "Brainwave Headband" for Menopausal Sleep—and It Worked

Yahoo

20-03-2025

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Menopause really throws a wrench into your day-to-day, with a grab bag of possible effects such as weight gain, brain fog and yes, sleep disruptions. (And the ins and outs of these hormonal fluctuations are important to know as early as your 30s, doctors say.) The sleep disruption of menopause was a real surprise to me, since I've always needed—and easily got—a solid eight hours if sleep. (According to the National Sleep Foundation, approximately 61 percent of menopausal women have sleep problems.) But when my racing thoughts before falling asleep and middle-of-the-night wake-ups led to insomnia, I tried melatonin, only to feel groggy the next morning. Lately, magnesium powder has been helping me get to sleep, but I'm still plagued by middle-of-the-night wakefulness. So I was pretty tired of all this hormonal sleep disruption by the time I tried Elemind, a Star Trek-looking headband that uses sleep research and AI technology to give your brain the equivalent of white noise to fall asleep.
Jo McKinney, the CMO of Elemind, says she's in the same boat as me: 'When I entered perimenopause, I began experiencing sleep disruptions for the first time. I found it challenging to fall asleep and often woke up in the middle of the night unable to return to sleep,' she told me. 'This was a new and frustrating experience for me, and it highlighted just how vital quality sleep is - I felt the impact of sleeplessness in every part of my life. Perimenopause for me ironically started right when I had been promoted to CEO of a prior company, and so I was missing sleep while simultaneously really needing it.'
Dana Dickey
Speak on it, Jo. I can't be missing sleep while I've got a household to run, family to engage with and some sort of community life to maintain. So I charged the headband for its allotted three hours, then downloaded the Elemind app and paired the device with it. The trickiest part of the whole experience was my initial fitting of the headband—the right strap needs to rest against the Occipital Bone, the thick bone just behind your ear, in order to best read your brain waves. The Elemind app shows you if you the headband optimally placed by giving you a green-means-go readout, so you're not left wondering if it's in the right place; after a week of using, I could feel that I had it resting correctly.
Speak on it, Jo. I can't be missing sleep while I've got a household to run, family to engage with and some sort of community life to maintain. So I charged the headband for its allotted three hours, then downloaded the Elemind app and paired the device with it. The trickiest part of the whole experience was my initial fitting of the headband—the right strap needs to rest against the Occipital Bone, the thick bone just behind your ear, in order to best read your brain waves. The Elemind app shows you if you the headband optimally placed by giving you a green-means-go readout, so you're not left wondering if it's in the right place; after a week of using, I could feel that I had it resting correctly.
Truthfully, when I first heard about 'neuromodulation' and 'brain waves,' my BS meter went to 11. Come on, I thought, this gadget is going to read electrical signals sent by my brain. But indeed it does—or seems to from using it—since the device rests on the skin similar to how an electroencephalogram (EEG for short) is fitted to measure the electrical activity in the brain. The Elemind quickly measures your brain waves, then using AI technology creates acoustic stimulation to counter those waves. You know how noise cancelling headphones emit a whoosh to counter the outside noises you're hearing? That's what Elemind does, except for the racing thoughts in our head.
The front half of the headband is covered in a super-soft synthetic that feels like neoprene and rests comfortably mid-forehead. The adjustable elastic on the back of the headband is easy to tighten or, and it never loosened or became dislodged during my two weeks' test. Also, while the design looks clunky, it didn't slip off my head even tho I toss and turn repeatedly during the night.
Ah, the secret sauce. There's a sample sound on the device's web site which with a bit of variation sounded like my Elemind. As I was sitting in the dark, eyes closed (the brain wave-reading tech requires your eyes to be closed for proper reading) with this off device making strange noises, I asked myself: 'What am I hearing right now?' Truthfully, it recalled the time I had a mouse stuck in my closet, hearing someone sweep the porch and light rain. But then, in keeping with the spirit of the thing, I tried to clear away my thoughts, breathe deeply and just listen to the noises. I'm yawning now just thinking back to how sleepy this made me, and the next thing I knew, it was the next day and I was waking up in my bed with a headband on. All in all, I'd sum up the audio as 'strange, but non-offensive' and startlingly effective in getting me to sleep.
Dana Dickey
Elemind's own clinical trials report that 76 percent of participants fell asleep faster when using Elemind. On average, they fell asleep 48 percent faster; the maximum improvement was a 74 percent reduction in the time it took to fall asleep. For me, the real eureka moment I had with Elemind was when I used it at 3 a.m. when I awoke one night and started in with my racing thoughts—a sort of whirligig spiral that included but was not limited to the bills, the dog dental appointment, the garage clean-out, natural disasters, political instability, skin laxity. Rather than continue that endless anxiety loop, I opted instead to open the Elemind app and hit the large 'get back to sleep' prompt, which started the clicking sound. In previous middle-night wakefulness episodes, I was awake for hours, but when I listened to Elemind, I was asleep in less than a half-hour.
$349 at Elemind