Company mission | CBT insomnia app

The problem we exist to solve

Insomnia is a mass condition that almost nobody is trained to treat

Chronic insomnia — trouble sleeping at least three nights a week for more than three months — is one of the most common chronic conditions in the United States. It is also one of the least treated. Both halves of that sentence are worth looking at directly.

Roughly as many American adults live with chronic insomnia as live with diabetes

Diabetes

~38 million

Chronic insomnia

~30 million

Each dot represents about one million US adults.

The difference is who can treat it

Diabetes is managed by a large frontline workforce — primary care clinicians treat most of it, with endocrinologists for the harder cases. Insomnia has no equivalent bench. Counting everyone qualified to treat each condition, the load per clinician is not remotely comparable.

Based on national prevalence estimates and clinician workforce counts — see the note below.

What the guidelines say

Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia, recommended ahead of medication by the American College of Physicians.

What usually happens

Most people get a prescription, or the generic sleep-hygiene advice — cut the caffeine, dim the screens, keep a schedule — that was designed for mild, short-term sleep problems.

And reaching that first-line treatment is the beginning of care, not the end of it. Chronic insomnia is more often than not a manifestation of deeper unresolved psychological issues — unresolved anxiety, burnout, other mental health conditions. Treating it properly means staying with someone while those root causes are worked through. That takes clinicians who are trained for it, and a way to sustain that care over time without the economics collapsing. Almost nothing in American healthcare is set up to do either.

That is the gap we exist to close.

Population figures are drawn from published national prevalence estimates; workforce figures from published clinician counts. Both are rounded to show the scale of the gap rather than a precise headcount. Chronic insomnia prevalence estimates vary with the diagnostic criteria applied.

The story behind our mission

Why we started, and what we built

Stellar Sleep started in 2021 as a venture at Harvard Innovation Labs, for the least strategic reason possible: two of our co-founders could not sleep. One spent over a year with chronic insomnia, averaging under five hours a night for months at a stretch. The other woke at three or four in the morning, night after night, angry at himself for being awake.

“We tried everything to treat our insomnia from cutting coffee, blocking blue light, to taking sleeping pills, but couldn’t find anything that worked. Our insomnia was turning us into literal waking zombies. Our performance at work suffered, our personal relationships suffered, our own happiness suffered.”

We tried what everyone tries, then went looking for actual treatment — and ran into the gap above from the inside. Almost everything available to us had been built for mild, occasional sleeplessness. Nothing addressed why we were awake.

The sleep research pointed somewhere the advice never did. Chronic insomnia is more often than not a manifestation of deeper unresolved psychological issues — unresolved anxiety, burnout, other mental health conditions — and those are the real culprits behind the persistent version of it. Yet those were exactly the factors mainstream insomnia treatment skipped.

Chronic insomnia is more often than not a manifestation of deeper unresolved psychological issues

So we built for the cause rather than the symptom — and because the gap has two halves, so does the answer. The app puts the evidence-based starting point of insomnia care within reach of the millions of people who will never sit across from a specialist. The clinician network is for the people who need more than that: real, continuing care from someone trained in insomnia, for as long as it takes to work through what is driving it.

Underneath both sits Rhythm, the AI operations platform we built in-house. It exists for an unglamorous reason: continuing care only reaches people if the economics of delivering it hold up. Rhythm absorbs the administrative work so our clinicians spend their time on patients instead of paperwork — which is what makes long-term insomnia care viable at the scale the problem actually has. Our mission is not merely to help people sleep better. It is to resolve what is keeping them awake, and to build an organization capable of doing that for a population the size of a chronic disease.

Wherever you are with it, there is a way in

The app is the fastest place to start, built on the psychology of why you are awake rather than the symptom. If you need continuing care, our clinician network practices nationwide and works with insurance. The quiz points you to whichever one fits.

Take the sleep quiz

The care system chronic insomnia never had