If you’re like me, you have a love-hate relationship with your sleep life. You love sleeping, and you hate not feeling like you’re getting enough sleep. I’ve known I was a night-owl for most of my life, easily staying up late and sleeping in. I am NOT a morning person.
Years ago, in an effort to also help combat onset insomnia (difficulty falling asleep), I began using an Android app (sorry iPhone users, not iOS version) called Sleep as Android. It runs while you sleep and uses device accelerometers to measure movement and deduce what state of sleep you are in. Additionally, it can time alarms to go off early so that it wakes you when you’re in a lighter sleep phase, meaning you don’t wake up groggy.
When you wake up, it asks you to rate your sleep, and if you want you can tag various things such as migraine, late night of work, whether you exercised, had a nightmare, etc. It then over time builds a profile of your sleep and recommends certain things to improve your sleep quality. For instance, it confirmed that I’m like a night-owl chronotype and based on how long I sleep in on the weekends, I would do best with roughly 7 hours of sleep starting between 12:42 and 1:42. As of now, I’ve been using the app for over six years and have over 2600 entries, and the app keeps improving! It offers the ability to record loud noises for you to listen back to later to identify snoring or sleep talking, and there is a large range of wearable devices supported, from smart watches to some O2 sensors and heart monitors.
Finally, if you struggle to get out of bed and hit the snooze button more times than you’d care to admit, you can employ some extreme options, such as having to solve a series of math puzzles, or scan a QR code you’ve put in another room. Just be sure anyone you live with is ok with it!