The routine was the same every night. Teeth brushed, phone parked across the room, goggles on, SmartRelax mode, lights off. We also ran a handful of afternoon sessions after long screen stretches, because Therabody pitches this as much for eye strain and tension headaches as for sleep. Twelve nights is enough to know whether a gadget sticks or ends up in the drawer with the jade roller.

First, what it does. Inside the padded shell sit heating elements and small massage mechanisms that press and knead around your temples, brows, and forehead, and a sensor in the fabric reads your heart rate. You pick one of three treatments: a sleep prep mode, a headache relief mode, and SmartRelax, which paces the massage rhythm to your pulse and slowly drags it downward. Heat and intensity are adjustable, and every control lives on the mask itself, so theres no fishing for your phone in the dark.

The first 30 seconds are strange. The compression builds around your eye sockets like a blood pressure cuff for your face, and we nearly bailed on night one. Stick with it to about minute three. That’s when the warmth catches up to the squeezing and the whole thing tips from weird into very, very good. The kneading around the temples is where the money went. No cheap buzzy vibration here.

On sleep, the results were good but not spotless. Nine of the twelve nights we were out within minutes of the session ending, which beats our usual routine of lying there rehearsing tomorrow’s arguments. Nights four and nine we pulled the mask off restless and annoyed, both after late coffee, so take that for what it is. The SmartRelax pacing sounds like marketing until you feel your pulse actually settle into it. It’s the one feature we expected to be a gimmick and wasnt.

Now the gripes. The motors hum. It’s quiet, but in a silent bedroom you’ll hear it, and a light sleeper sharing your bed might too. Our fix was running it alongside one of the picks from our white noise machine roundup, which buried the sound completely. The bigger issue: you cannot sleep in this thing. It’s nearly a pound of padded shell on your face, and the moment you roll to your side it shoves off your nose. When the session ends it shuts off, and you set it on the nightstand. If you want a mask that stays on till morning, the Manta Sleep Mask Pro is still our pick, at a fraction of the price.

Battery held up better than expected, around 150 minutes per charge, which worked out to roughly nine sessions before we reached for the USB-C cable. The face pad is the weak spot long term. It picks up skin oil fast and Therabody says hand wash only, so plan on wiping it down every few days. And yes, the price. Our favorite plain blackout masks cost under $40, so the extra money buys the massage, the heat, and the pulse pacing. Whether that trade makes sense depends on why you’re not falling asleep in the first place.

Buy it if your problem is switching off. The people this helps most get into bed wired: tension headache types, screen workers with tired eyes, anyone whose brain treats the pillow like a meeting room. It compresses a 45 minute restless wind down into 15 structured minutes.

Skip it if you hate pressure on your face, share a bed with someone the hum would bother, or mainly need light blocking. A simple mask from our blackout sleep mask roundup handles that job for a tenth of the cost. Side sleepers hoping to wear it all night will be disappointed too. That use case just isn’t what this is.