Waking Up
2026
Deep Rest Reset with Dr. Andy Galpin
Overview
Building a new kind of sleep challenge
Sleep was already one of the strongest areas of interest within the Waking Up community, but the opportunity went beyond creating more sleep content. We wanted to build an experience that could help people understand why they weren’t recovering well and give them a practical system for changing it.
I developed the campaign concept with Dr. Andy Galpin and Absolute Rest, combining Andy’s expertise in human performance and recovery with Waking Up’s strength in attention and nervous-system training. The result was Deep Rest Reset: a free, 14-day program built around education, daily behavior change, guided practice, reflection, and measurable progress.
The core proposition was intentionally different from traditional sleep challenges. Instead of giving participants another list of sleep tips, we designed a system they could practice and carry forward.
The Impact
Deep Rest Reset became one of Waking Up’s largest integrated partnership campaigns, generating 60K+ registrations and creating a new model for combining expert-led education, community participation, product experience, and measurable behavior change.
Opportunity
Sleep was a pain point. Content alone wasn’t the answer.
We saw a recurring signal across the Waking Up audience: people were deeply interested in sleep, recovery, and improving how they felt during the day.
But most sleep solutions fell into familiar categories: information, supplements, devices, or generic sleep-hygiene advice. The opportunity was to create something more useful: a structured experience that translated expert knowledge into behaviors people could actually practice.
Dr. Andy Galpin was a natural partner. His work brought credibility in physiology, performance, and recovery, while Waking Up could provide the training component that helped people move from understanding recovery intellectually to practicing it.
The strategic question became:
How could we turn sleep education into an experience people would actually complete, feel, and remember?
Strategy
Designing around behavior, not consumption numbers
Rather than build another content series, we designed Deep Rest Reset as a daily ritual.
Every day followed the same simple framework:
Learn — understand the science behind the day’s sleep or recovery principle.
Act — make one concrete behavioral change.
Train — use a guided Waking Up practice to transition the nervous system from stimulation toward rest.
Reflect — track sleep, recovery, and adherence offline.
That structure was deliberate. Repetition made the program easy to understand, while progressively layering new behaviors gave participants a sense of momentum and commitment.
We also positioned meditation differently for Andy’s audience. Instead of presenting it as a spiritual or wellness practice, we introduced it as a tool for performance, recovery, and nervous-system training, making Waking Up relevant to an entirely new audience.
I've used and recommended Waking Up to my clients and athletes for years. It's great for seasoned meditators, but even better for those just starting their journey. I had zero experience meditating, found the introductory course, and was astonished. It was not what I was expecting at all. I've even added a few of my favorite tracks for you to try for free here.”
Dr. Andy Galpin
Exercise Physiologist / Human Performance Expert
Experience
Creating a campaign people could participate in, not just watch
The experience extended far beyond the launch creative.
I worked cross-functionally across partnership strategy, brand, product, creative, lifecycle, community, and external partner teams to build the full participant journey, from discovery through post-challenge conversion.
The campaign included a dedicated registration experience and daily content hub, Andy’s video lessons, behavioral interventions, guided Waking Up practices, morning and evening lifecycle messaging, community discussion, live Q&A, printable reflection tools, and optional wearable integration.
We also built the GTM across both brands, using Waking Up’s owned channels alongside Andy’s podcast, newsletter, YouTube, social platforms, and community to create a coordinated launch rather than a traditional sponsored partnership. The campaign brief specifically planned parallel internal and external marketing tracks, with Andy’s introduction video as the core acquisition asset across landing page and social.
Partnership
Building something neither brand could create alone
The strongest partnerships aren’t about borrowing reach. They create a reason for both brands to exist in the same experience.
Andy brought the physiology: the science behind sleep, stress adaptation, and recovery.
Waking Up brought the practice: tools for training attention and helping the mind and nervous system transition out of constant stimulation.
That distinction became the foundation for everything from positioning and messaging to the daily curriculum and campaign creative.
Instead of placing Waking Up next to Andy’s content as a sponsor, we designed the product itself around the complementary strengths of both brands.
This was also the central idea in the campaign’s external positioning: performance science and contemplative practice working together, rather than either being presented as sufficient on its own.
Results
Turning participation into measurable impact
Deep Rest Reset demonstrated that a partnership could do more than generate awareness. By giving people a clear reason to participate every day, the campaign created meaningful engagement across acquisition, product experience, community, and behavior change.
46K Registrations
3,526 Wearables connected
~200K Nights of sleep data
+41 min Improvement in sleep
Over 700 users acquired
