For years now I have wondered what my sleep patterns looked like for various reasons. Once again thanks to technology,
How To Improve Sleep Quality and Quantity
I’ve always wondered things like:
- Have I been getting enough sleep?
- Am I sleeping deep enough to be properly rested?
- What is my sleep quality like?
Well, thanks to the Sleep Cycle I’ve been able to monitor my sleep patterns and in turn have improved my sleep quality greatly.
Ditch your standard, irritating phone alarm, set it on the app and choose a peaceful melody to be woken up by. It follows your sleep through three different stages outlined in the graph – Awake, Sleep and Deep Sleep and based on where you are at it will try and wake you in a window of sleep that will be less disruptive.
Waking up with the Sleep Cycle app is incredibly easier than my standard, snooze-prone alarm. I wake up feeling less groggy like I haven’t had a broken sleep or woken up from a deep fog.
There are a few additional functions in which you can choose whether you woke up in a ‘bad’, ‘neutral’ or ‘positive’ state – all indicated by a small coloured face. Another is choosing from a group of sleep notes for that day; eating late, drinking coffee, stressful day etc. This gives the app extra data to go off when consolidating everything into your graph.
Additional features include the time in bed (an hourly breakdown of how long you were in bed) and the sleep quality (which rates you out of 100%). To give you an indication, when I started using this app, my sleep quality ranked around 60% and now I sitting between 85% to 92% on average with a couple of ‘100%’ quality nights! Sometimes it’s a simple case of just getting to bed slightly earlier so I can just get a few more hours or minutes of shut-eye but I am definitely more aware of the importance of a good night’s sleep since using it.
Be sure to place your phone on your bed properly in order for it to collect the data correctly. Also, take the time to go through and choose an alarm melody that suits your taste. There are quite a few nice sounds to choose from – just head to the settings page of the app.
I’m sure if you give this app a go you will be less likely to have Dysania – the state of finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning. I know my case has definitely been reduced!