The problem with every lock you set for yourself is that you also hold the key. Sleep Well moves the key out of your hands and into someone else’s — literally, as an object they can put in a drawer.
The usual advice is to have a friend set your Screen Time passcode. It fails for reasons everyone discovers within a week: you can watch them type it, you can reset it through your Apple account, and asking for it costs them a text message and you nothing. The friction is social, and social friction collapses at 1am when nobody’s awake to judge you.
The key is a USB drive holding a random 256-bit secret. Your Mac stores only its fingerprint, so copying the drive without the secret gets you nothing.
Getting the key back means physically going to wherever it is. That’s not an inconvenience in the design — it’s the entire mechanism.
Sleep Well refuses to mint a second key while the first is still mounted, so you can’t quietly issue yourself a spare and leave your partner holding a dead one.
The best holder is someone nearby but not too available: a roommate down the hall, a partner who sleeps earlier than you, a neighbour. Someone reachable in a genuine emergency and inconvenient to reach over a video you want to finish.
And if there’s nobody to give it to, the lock still works — it releases on its own at the wake time you set. Losing the key costs you nothing except the ability to end a night early. That’s the only thing it can do.
The same commitment model is coming to iOS: choose the apps, choose a length from one to ninety days, and there’s no control inside the app to shorten it. A physical-key release on your Mac syncs across so a genuine emergency releases both.
One email when the iPhone app ships. Nothing else.
What it takes to remove every escape that matters, and where the honest limits are.
How a bedtime lock survives extra monitors, Spaces, sleep and restart.