For parents of young children, sleeping through the night can seem like just an unattainable dream. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife has been having trouble staying asleep the entire night because she kept waking up to check the time on her phone, but he says he came up with a solution. He built a glowing “sleep box” to enable her to know when it’s time to get up to take care of their toddlers.

How Mark Zuckerberg’s glowing sleep box works

He posted details about his sleep box and a photo of it on Instagram. A very faint glow emits from the box between 6 and 7 a.m. His wife Priscilla Chan can open her eyes briefly to see if the light is on. If it’s not, then she can go back to sleep, but if it is, then she knows their children will be waking up soon. Apparently, seeing what time it is also keeps her awake because she’s concerned about oversleeping. The light emitted by the box is just bright enough to see if she wakes up but not bright enough to actually wake her up if she’s sleeping.

It seems like Zuckerberg must not have any plans to build the box and sell it on his own. He said he shared his idea in case anyone else wanted to pick up the idea and run with it. It’s anyone’s guess whether a product like this would catch on, but given that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are concerned to be a very trendy couple, it seems like this glowing sleep box could end up becoming a fad simply because of their popularity.

Here’s Zuckerberg’s Instagram post about the glowing sleep box:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Being a mom is hard, and since we’ve had kids Priscilla has had a hard time sleeping through the night. She’ll wake up and check the time on her phone to see if the kids might wake up soon, but then knowing the time stresses her out and she can’t fall back asleep. So I worked on building her what I call the “sleep box”. It sits on her nightstand, and between the hours of 6-7am it emits a very faint light — visible enough that if she sees it she’ll know it’s an okay time for one of us to get the kids, but faint enough that the light won’t wake her up if she’s still sleeping. And since it doesn’t show the time, if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she knows to just go back to sleep without having to worry about what time it is. So far this has worked better than I expected and she can now sleep through the night. As an engineer, building a device to help my partner sleep better is one of the best ways I can think of to express my love and gratitude. A bunch of my friends have told me they’d want something like this, so I’m putting this out there in case another entrepreneur wants to run with this and build sleep boxes for more people!

A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck) on Apr 27, 2019 at 9:45am PDT