Sunday, December 2, 2012

A Science to Sleeping?

App Store Icon
Sleep is the key to success. If you get enough sleep, you perform better, in all aspects of life including sports and school.

Last summer, my friend told me about a sleep cycle alarm app. She said it woke you up at the time when you'd feel the most rested. I decided to give it a try. The app was only $1, and it turned out to be one of the best $1 investments of my life.

The Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock by Maciek Drejak Labs ingeniously calculates the optimal time for you to wake up. By putting in the time you need to wake up by, the app creates a half an hour time slot for when it will wake you up. It wakes you up in your lightest sleep phase, when you're closest to being awake. At first I was a bit skeptical. Could it be a fluke? Could it really be possible for this $1 app to accurately map out your sleep cycles? Weren't applications/software like that usually extremely expensive? Yet, as I read the reviews, tens of thousands of people were extremely satisfied with it.

Recommended Placement
When I finally downloaded it, the app immediately caught my attention. I put it under my mattress cover, like it instructed me to, and went to sleep. Not expecting much the first night (because it takes 5 days to calibrate), I surprisingly woke up at a time when I actually felt good, and not extremely groggy from the previous night's sleep.

As I continued using it, the app became more and more astonishing. Not only did it show you a graph showing your sleep movement, but it gave you a percentage of sleep quality. Depending on the calmness and length of time you slept, you would have a different sleep quality ranging from 0%-100%. It would also generate other graphs that showed what things affected your sleep quality and averages for the amount of time you spend in bed as well as what time you go to bed.

I would highly recommend this app to people who feel like smashing their alarm clock to bits when they wake up in the morning, as well as anyone else looking for an exemplary alarm clock.

Here is the link to download the app in the App Store/iTunes (it's currently only available on the iPod, iPhone, and iPad): https://itunes.apple.com/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id320606217

3 comments:

  1. This blog post is amazing. The Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock app seems like the $1 investment of my life since I average about 3 hours of sleep a day. My grades will most likely improve if I follow what this app tells me to do. In fact, my life will improve because I won't feel tired most of the day. What interests me the most about this app is that it graphs out your sleep movement and gives you a percentage of sleep quality. This type of information can really have me realize how terrible my sleeping quality is. In addition, is it true that if you sleep well one night, you won't need to sleep as much two days after?
    There were no mistakes that I could find in this blog post. I like the transitions and how you ended it, by recommending it to other people and giving the link to the app.

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  2. The sleeping application seems to be an extremely useful app, but I am a little skeptical of it. Scientists have proposed that cell phone radiation is bad for one's health, so they suggest placing the phone far away from the head.However, the application requires the sleeper to place the phone next to his or her head for a prolonged period of time, so would it not be bad for you?

    Other than the placement issue, the app sounds like it would be beneficial for me. I loathe waking up in the morning, and it takes 3 alarms to wake me. I place them in different locations in my room, so I would be forced to run around to turn them off.If the application actually wakes me up during my lightest sleep phrase, I would then not need the 3 obnoxious alarms anymore.

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    1. If you're worried about cell phone radiation, the app recommends you put your phone into airplane mode which will turn off your cell phone radiation. Airplane mode can be turned on by going into the settings on your phone :)

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