Editorial standards
How this material is made
A sleep site is health content, which means the cost of being casually wrong is paid by the reader. These are the rules everything here is written under, published so you can hold the site to them.
Sourcing
- Primary sources first. Peer-reviewed studies, systematic reviews, and position statements from bodies such as the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Where a secondary source is used, it is named and linked as a secondary source.
- Every factual claim is linked. References sit at the foot of each article, with a note on what each source supports.
- Ranges are preserved. If a study reported a range, the article reports the range. Collapsing a distribution to its midpoint is treated as an error here, not a simplification.
- Sample sizes and study types are stated where they affect how much weight a finding deserves.
- Single-study claims are labelled. One interesting result is not a consensus and does not get written as one.
Drafting, AI, and review
Articles are researched against sources selected by the named author, drafted with AI assistance, and then reviewed and approved by Chaitanya Banerjee before publication. Nothing is published without a human having read it against the sources. This is disclosed on every article rather than buried in a policy page, because a reader deciding how much to trust a health claim is entitled to know how it was produced.
Why AI is used at all
Because the alternative is not a better site, it is almost no site. The author is a full-time medical student. Researching a subject properly, reading the papers and deciding what a study will and will not support takes as long as it takes; turning that into publishable prose is the part that can be assisted, and without that assistance this site would manage perhaps one article a term.
The honest framing is that AI supplies drafting speed. It does not supply judgement, and the judgement is where the value is.
What AI does not do here
- It does not choose what gets written. Topics are chosen on the basis of what the author has genuine standing to write about — something lived, or something his training lets him read properly. Where he has neither, the page is not written and the reader is sent to a better source.
- It does not decide what is true. Every factual claim is checked against the source by the author before publication.
- It does not generate citations. This one matters most. Language models invent plausible-looking references, and a fabricated citation on a health page is among the worst things this site could publish. No reference appears on MySleepMate that the author has not opened and read. If you find one that does not say what it is cited for, that is a correction and it will be logged.
- It does not write the first-person passages. Where an article says “I”, that is the author's own experience in his own words.
Where the human work actually is
Selecting the sources. Deciding which claims are checkable and which are rhetoric. Noticing when a study says something narrower than the sentence it is being used to support. Deciding what to leave out. Being willing to publish a conclusion that undercuts the site's own calculator. None of that is automated, and none of it could be.
Health content specifically
- No diagnosis, no treatment advice. The site describes sleep physiology and scheduling for healthy adults.
- Every article carries a medical disclaimer and points to a clinician for the situations a website cannot address.
- No supplement, device or product recommendations are made on the basis of the science discussed here.
- Guideline figures are attributed to the body that issued them, with the issuing body named in the text rather than laundered into "experts say".
Claims we decline to repeat
Some things are widely published in the sleep-advice category and are not supported well enough to appear here as fact.
| Common claim | Our position |
|---|---|
| A sleep cycle is 90 minutes | Stated as an average of a roughly 70–120 minute range, never as a constant. |
| Waking between cycles makes you feel refreshed | The mechanism is plausible and the specific method is unproven. We say so, on the homepage and in the audit. |
| Everyone needs exactly eight hours | Declined. Guidelines are ranges; the AASM adult position is 7 hours or more. |
| You can train yourself to need less sleep | Declined. Short sleep without impairment is a rare inherited trait, not a skill. |
| Consumer trackers measure your sleep stages | Described as estimates inferred from movement and heart rate, not measurements of brain activity. |
Corrections and updates
When something here is wrong, it is fixed and the fix is recorded in the corrections log with the date and a description of what changed. Substantive corrections are noted on the affected article too. Silent edits to factual claims are not acceptable.
Articles carry a published date and a modified date in their structured data, and both are accurate. A page is not re-dated to look fresh.
Independence
There is currently no advertising, affiliate income, or sponsorship on this site, as set out on the about page. If that changes, it will be disclosed on the affected pages, and no commercial relationship may alter a factual claim or suppress an unfavourable finding.
Hold us to it
If an article breaks one of these rules, that is a correction, and corrections here are public.
Report a problem