Exclusive | This high-tech headband changes your brainwaves to help you fall asleep faster — does it work?

A few weeks ago, I ducked out of the office to take a nap at a hotel — for journalism.

Neurotech startup Elemind offered me the chance to try out its high-tech headband, which promises to put you to sleep faster by literally changing your brainwaves.

I had to know — could it be that easy? Could this headband, which sends sound through your skull, really be the key to getting better rest without popping drugs or supplements?

Spoiler alert: I really didn’t want to get up when my nap was over.

America is having a bit of a sleep crisis. A Gallup poll last year found that 42% of adults don’t get as much sleep as they need, with only 25% reporting that they average eight hours a night. Experts recommend seven to nine.

Insufficient sleep has been linked to countless health issues, including brain aging, visceral fat, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart and kidney issues, depression and increased inflammation.

And of course, it makes you feel pretty terrible.

“Sleep truly is a superpower,” Meredith Perry, co-founder and CEO of Elemind, told The Post. “If you have better sleep, it can be a force multiplier for everything else in your life, whether it’s your hormones or emotional regulation or mental acuity. If you have good sleep, everything else in your life becomes better.”

How does it work?

Elemind was launched last year by Perry — a former NASA employee — and other neuroscientists to help people find a way to fall asleep faster without pharmaceuticals.

Their lightweight $349 headband is like “noise cancellation, but for the brain,” she explained. It works by using sensors to read your brain and “drive [it] from wakeful patterns to restful patterns using just sound.”

“We read your brainwaves and send a sound pulse at a very specific moment in time relative to your unique brainwaves to disrupt the brainwaves associated with wakefulness, which helps drive the brain to sleep.”

Sound like something out of “Severance”? Your “outie” may get sleepy, but there’s nothing dangerous happening to your brain.

“We’re simply just using sound,” Perry said. “So in the same way music can relax you, we’re playing music that is nudging your brain into sleep.”

That sound comes through as a sort of pink noise that you hear not through your ears but through your skull via a metal bone conductor — again, fully on the outside of your head.

In clinical trials, 76% of people using the headband were able to fall asleep 48% faster on average. Some people were able to fall asleep 74% faster.

And while you can program the headband to turn off once you’re asleep using Elemind’s app, it’s safe to leave on all night — and if you do, it’ll use the same technology to nudge you back to sleep if you wake up at 3 a.m.

Testing out the Elemind headband

To really prep me for a good nap, Elemind invited me to an upscale hotel with a seriously soft bed and blackout curtains. Perry set me up with the headband, having me place it over my forehead, with the sensors making contact with my skin.

She explained that your eyes had to be fully closed for it to work — it can’t pick up on the brainwaves when your eyes are open — and the volume should be set at the lowest that you’re still able to hear it.

I love a bit of white noise to help me sleep, so the pink noise I could “hear” vibrating through my skull felt pretty natural, even if it was sort of a random pulsing pattern.

But I didn’t actually fall asleep. To be fair, I generally find it pretty tough to go down when I have to wake up in a short amount of time. No matter how tired I am, if I know that an alarm will go off in an ever-shrinking window — 20 minutes… 15… 10… 5… — it’s pretty unlikely I’ll drift off.

I also think the particular circumstances of this nap — which ended when my videographer walked into the room, filming to catch my first reaction upon waking — weren’t the most conducive to falling asleep.

That being said, I did feel really cozy in that bed, and I do think it relaxed me faster than if I’d just been lying there on my own.

And if I’d used it at night — and wasn’t getting the Kim Kardashian treatment with my personal cameraman waiting for my REM cycle confessional — I’m pretty sure it would have worked.

Perry herself uses it every night and called it a “game changer for my sleep,” but noted that for a lot of people it takes about a week to get used to.

If that means I need to take a week’s worth of workday naps, I’m in.