TLDR - you are probably blinded to your biggest irritations, and they just might be ingrained into society to such an extent that we think nothing can be done about them. Just turning on the light to see them and asking the right question is just the 1st step.

I think the real challenge is that what bothers most people are actually minor irritations. We don't notice the big thing shouting at us that it's a problem.

This was my experience which lead me into neurotech/sleeptech.

I'm a lifelong insomniac. I was going through sleep labs as a kid. I had done all the CBTi (though I don't think it was called that in the 80s), sleep hygiene, etc. etc. I'm quite healthy, just crap sleeper.

I was almost 50 when at 3am I thought to myself "I don't care if I sleep, I just don't want to be tired anymore".

I thought that was an interesting thought. Poor sleep had been ruining my life for the most part of 5 decades.

So I started looking into the latest in sleep research (I had worked in healthtech at Australia's science and technology research agency), and it all seemed very much the same as what I'd heard before. I started tracking everything, trying to figure out if I could build some sort of algorithm that picked up a signal of what I was doing when I had good sleep vs bad.

This was completely the wrong approach. My irritation wasn't truly that I couldn't sleep enough. That was part of it, but the bigger irritation was that I was always tired. Even though I asked the right question, the global mentality was "you need to sleep longer".

That was until I discovered research in slow-wave enhancement, which increases the synchronous firing of neurons which are the defining marker of deep sleep. This is tapping into the restorative function of sleep, not focusing on sleep time.

So I think that finding the irritation that may be hidden from you is step 1. But beyond that, who else has had the same irritation, and what have they done about it. Why did their solutions not work. Then, why do you think you can do it better?

If you're curious about what we're building, you can check out https://affectablesleep.com