Mark Zuckerberg built an empire out of sharing information.
(Whether we all wanted to or not, am, I right?)
All jokes aside, at the end of the day, he is an engineer with a mind built for puzzles. So of course he had the perfect solution for his wife, who was having trouble sleeping through the night.
Here’s what he did!
Mark’s wife, Priscilla, is an incredibly brilliant woman.
We always hear about Mark, due to the fact that he straight-up invented Facebook.
But Priscilla is a genius in her own right. Not only is she a Harvard graduate, she has her doctorate from the University of California.
She’s an accomplished woman in many fields.
After completing medical school, she became a pediatrician.
She’s also a philanthropist. She and Mark co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, of which one arm is dedicated to funding research to cure or manage diseases by the year 2100.
The two married in 2012
And quietly, too.
Not one day after Facebook debuted on the stock market, Priscilla and Mark finally said “I do” in 2012.
They’d been dating since their Harvard days, back in 2003.
She gave birth to she and Mark’s first child in 2015
In July of 2015, Mark announced that he and Priscilla were expecting their first child.
Priscilla gave birth to Maxima Chan Zuckerberg in late 2015, and Mark announced her arrival on December 1st.
Baby #2 came along in 2017
Unlike Maxima, their next daughter was named for a pretty obvious reason!
Priscilla gave birth to their youngest daughter in August of 2017. The two decided to name her August, which is pretty self-explanatory.
Ever since, Mark says Priscilla has had a hard time sleeping
In an Instagram post, he laid out the problem his wife has had sleeping — and it has everything to do with their kids.
According to him, her trouble sleeping has to do with waking up repeatedly in the night.
It sounds like she has anxiety surrounding scheduling
Mark said:
“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.”
I have experienced that same anxiety. (I mean, I don’t have kids, but my cat needs feeding. That’s…not the same at all, actually.)
So, Mark came up with a solution.
Since Priscilla’s trouble seems to center around her phone and the time, he decided to take both out of the equation.
He calls it the “sleep box,” and I lowkey want one?
Here’s how the sleep box works.
“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.”
This sounds like it completely eliminates alarm anxiety.
It also helps her go back to sleep if she happens to wake up too early
He said:
“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. “
I am about this!
It sounds like it’s actually helping her!
He looks like he also finds the act of helping his wife incredibly fulfilling, especially using skills he usually uses for work.
“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.”
He posted his story about the box to encourage others to build their own
Rather than keep the idea to himself, he chose to share it:
“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!”
And people love the idea.
Instagram’s fashion chief, Eva Chen ( @evachen212 ), like this idea for the aesthetic alone.
Considering my alarm clock is just my phone, I’m going to go ahead and agree with her. Also, a frog alarm clock sounds…pretty ugly, tbh.
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Even celebrities approve of this idea.
I was not expecting to find Christina Milian in the comments of Zuckerberg’s post, but here we are!
This is a super thoughtful thing of him to do for his wife, so it’s no wonder that people love it.
Check out the post here
Would you build something like this?
You probably don’t need to wait for one of those entrepreneurs to build one, either — you just need a box, and an LED strip that can be put on a timer.
A DIY, from me to you!
