Kathryn Nicolai has gotten really, really good at putting people to sleep. Getting a good night's sleep has always been something of a superpower for her, so it's only natural that she built a business around helping other people do it too.
"I always say, I sleep like it's my job," she says, laughing.
Nicolai describes herself as an architect of coziness. Her office, with its enormous lounge chair and dangling mobiles and strings of fairy lights, is practically a temple to the feeling.
"If I can make any part of my life feel softer or cuter, I'm going to do it," she says.
Once a yoga teacher, Nicolai is now the founder of the Nothing Much Happens empire, a podcast, book, and general storytelling machine that helps put millions of Americans to sleep as quickly as possible.
But how did a business based on telling bedtime stories to adults take off?
A moment of awakening
Nicolai, who will launch an app and release a second book next year, never imagined she'd be a professional writer. It wasn't until her early 30s, when a close friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer, that she began to think seriously about it.
"Right before she died, she said, 'You've got to make your dreams come true. I won't be able to do mine," Nicolai recalls. "And I said, 'I know.' And she went, 'Don't blow me off. I am telling you something very important right now.'"
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
Nicolai didn't even know what her dreams were. "I was just getting to the next day," she says. "I think that if Renee hadn't interrupted me, I would have kept doing that for a long time."
When she actually sat down to think about it, she realized something. What she really wanted, she thought, was to tell bedtime stories to adults.
Empire of rest
Like many kids, Nicolai grew up on stories. Her dad got her into audiobooks as a child, and she played a record that told the story of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase over and over for an entire summer.
As she got older, she turned to meditation and yoga, eventually becoming a full-time yoga teacher. She created and ran her own studio, met her wife and got married, and settled down with their dogs in Michigan.
When she had that pivotal conversation with her friend Renee, she was already spending a considerable amount of time using her voice and presence to help calm people down. But she'd long harbored a secret dream of becoming a writer. Maybe, she wondered, there was a way to combine both passions.
"Your life doesn't have to make sense to anybody else. If you have a passion, it doesn't matter if it works. It matters that you pursue it," she says.
The Hustle
At first, she wanted to tell a story in book form, but the barrier to entering the publishing industry felt high. A podcast seemed more accessible. Anyone with a microphone could have one. Why not her?
At the time, she knew of just one other sleep podcast, which recapped TV episodes. "I really thought, this is quite niche," she says.
It took her two years to actually sit down to record the first story — a rambling tale about all the smells and sensations you encounter as you make your way home from work in the rain, one that would help take her listeners from the day's onslaught of information to a quieter place.
She knew it would put people to sleep, because she'd been falling asleep to some version of it herself for years. She released the first episode in April 2018.
At first, the reception started out, well, sleepily. She was checking the download metrics every day: 24, 48, 100. A month in, the numbers ticked modestly upward, to ~1.5k.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
Back then, she was still running her yoga studio, teaching five or six times a week, writing stories, and recording the podcast. By the time she'd been putting out episodes for a year, she'd reached 10m downloads, earning money from ads and premium content subscriptions.
"And then I got a literary agent, and then I sold my book in about 35 countries," she says. "And I was like, okay, apparently this is going to be a thing."
Cost of insomnia
Americans clearly needed help getting a good night's rest. And Nicolai wasn't the only person thinking about how to help people sleep better.
In 2014, the CDC declared insufficient sleep a public health problem. For the one-third of Americans who aren't getting the recommended seven or more hours a night, that means higher rates of anxiety, depression, heart disease, and obesity, and other conditions.
By 2017, McKinsey & Company released a report suggesting private equity firms look into investing in sleep optimization. There's a business case to be made for the industry: Studies have estimated the US loses ~$400B a year in productivity due to sleep deprivation.
Over the last 10 years, the sleep industry has exploded. Mattress companies are multiplying, as are wearable tech options like Oura rings that monitor your activity so you can achieve optimal results even when sleeping.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
In 2015, Americans spent an estimated $41B on sleep aids. By 2024, that number sat at $67B. Consumers can now buy a whole host of CBD-infused gummies and oils. A few companies even make CBD-infused bedsheets and pillowcases.
Sleep tourism is also now a thing: Hotels are offering pillow menus and retreat weekends. Luxury resorts are offering trip itineraries focused on getting a better night's rest. Last year, trend forecast agency WGSN labeled "therapeutic laziness," AKA bed rotting, as one of the year's top trends.
The bedtime story market is also getting more crowded. When Nicolai started out, there was just one other sleep podcast. Now, there are hundreds, and apps like Calm are getting in on the boom, offering their own stories narrated by celebrities like Harry Styles and Matthew McConaughey.
Too much happening
Nicolai has come a long way from her first episode. Her stories, which are set in a village called Nothing Much, are effective because:
They're heavy on nostalgia and familiarity.
The overarching activity is soothing and/or enjoyable.
They're steeped in sensory detail.
As the title suggests, nothing much happens.
She still writes every story herself, all 495 of them now. But it wasn't until four years into the project that she sold her beloved yoga studio, going all-in on the village of Nothing Much.
"This whole enterprise I was building was about rest. I could not burn my candle at both ends and then try to pretend to know how to help people rest," she says.
She picked a lane, switched to a weekly episode release cadence, and watched her numbers soar. "Now, 200k [people] might listen to me on a day," she says.
She's at 200m downloads overall. She employs two of her friends, one of whom does "community care," AKA customer service, for the villagers (listeners) who span the globe.
A PSA issued by the US National Program on Insomnia and Sleep Disorders in 1985. (Photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Her stories focus on feelings: a morning with the windows open and fresh fall air blowing through, an evening when two friends meet for the first time, a walk through the backcountry after the rain. She's introduced listeners to librarians, bakers, innkeepers, and a whole host of animals that call Nothing Much their home.
"So many people tell me they wish they could live in the village of Nothing Much," she says.
In January, Nicolai is launching an app that will help them do that — at least for an hour or two every day.
The world of nothing much
The great thing about being famous for your voice is that although she has some high-profile fans — literary giant Meg Wolitzer, for one — Nicolai enjoys moving mostly anonymously through a life she calls ridiculously charmed.
She still lives in Michigan and spends her days dreaming up how to expand the village. She has kids' books in mind, and wants to write a book starring two beloved villagers, Marmalade (a cat) and Crumb (a dog). She'd also love to create feel-good sleep content for TV.
Participants dissect sleep data at a conference in New York City. (Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images for iHeartRadio)
"People like me sometimes get called Pollyanna-ish, or told we're walking around with rose-colored glasses," she says.
But, she points out, our brains are primed through negativity bias to focus on scary or upsetting things.
"So when you deliberately go out of your way to look for good things, that's not rose-colored glasses. That's taking off the gray ones. You're actually more of a realist than you were before."
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