Warning: This App Will Help You Sleep

How to get more sleep

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
- Anthony Burgess

Unless you’re one of the those people whose head hits the pillow and you immediately downshift into third stage REM, then you need this information. If you’re one of the before mentioned people — we secretly hate you. Even worse than those people who post their Hawaiian vacation pictures on Facebook with the caption: “Aloha!!”

This post is for those of us who have trouble sleeping. I shared a great tip for never waking up tired a couple of months back and that was really popular. I have another discovery. But first, a little background if you’re new here.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m the worst sleeper on the planet ¹. I’ve had sleep apnea, sleep hallucinations, snoring, sleep walking, going to the bathroom when sleeping (complete with waking up - magazine in hand) and I’ve even reenacted my 4th grade-after school basketball practice by sitting up in my sleep and throwing a picture-perfect chest pass across the room using my pillow. I could honestly hear our principal/basketball coach Norm Josephson screaming at me to throw it harder. Good times.

(Side note: okay, I’m writing on a plane right now and this 65-year-old woman is already in the bag wandering up and down the aisle and we haven’t been in the air an hour … and it’s 10:15 in the morning. God, I love people.)

I’ve tried and read so many things about falling asleep, staying asleep, waking up, etc. that I feel like a sleep expert ². I’ve had sleep studies, tried the ridiculous mask, the mouth-guard (that feels like one of those gimp-sex balls in your mouth — not that I’d know) taken different sleeping pills (I love you, Lunesta), drank sleepy-time tea, and even put a tennis ball on my back to keep from turning over. Some things worked while others didn’t. The trick is to string along the things that do work for you into a system.

I swear I’m getting to the point. I found something else that is pretty damn cool. It’s an iPhone app that tracks and logs your sleep while also acting as the world’s first peaceful alarm-clock called Sleep Cycle. It’s a great example of how mobile technology will soon be so ingrained in your life you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. It’s taking over, and that’s a good thing.

Sleep Cycle works while you sleep. You set it under your mattress pad (or sheet) and it tracks your movement while you’re sawing logs. Your movement indicates what stage of sleep you’re in and it uses the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer to sense if you’re in a light sleep, awake or in a deep sleep.

The app also makes waking up much more bearable by waiting until you’re out of a deep sleep to bring you into the real world. Most of us hate waking up because our alarm clock goes off while we’re in a deep sleep, which makes it much tougher to wake up. With Sleep Cycle, you choose a time-range when you want to rise and shine and it waits until you’ve shifted from a deep sleep into a light sleep to gradually wake you up.

After using it for a week or so you can investigate your sleep pattern. It also uses a notes feature to see if there’s a correlation between those nights where you just can’t get a decent nights sleep. It could be an overly stressful day, afternoon coffee or maybe a couple of glasses of wine before bed that is interrupting your sleep.

Give it a shot and let me know if it works for you. It’s not perfect, but might be one more thing to add to your system. It’s helped me, and it’s it actually pretty fun.

Also, let me know if you ever wake up in the bathroom, there’s always good comedy in that.

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