Daylight Savings Time is Saturday March 14, and like most people, it’s going to throw a wrench in my already touchy sleep schedule.
If you don’t quite consider yourself a morning person, you may want to shell out the 99 cents for the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock app for your iPhone.
Developed by LexWare Labs AB, The Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock works using the iPhone’s accelerometer to analyze your movement through the night. It detects your sleep cycles as you sleep and can, after a couple nights of data collecting, fully determine what your sleep cycles are.
Most people don’t even know what a sleep cycle is, so I will elaborate.
The average, healthy human goes through a few sleep cycles a night. These sleep cycles consist of four different stages:
Stage 1: Drowsiness – This lasts about five or ten minutes. Eyes move slowly under the eyelids, muscle activity slows down, and you are easily awakened.
Stage 2: Light Sleep – Heart rate slows, eye movement stops, and body temperature decreases.
Stages 3: Deep Sleep – You are difficult to awaken, and if you are, you feel groggy and disoriented for several minutes. Deep sleep allows the brain to restore the energy used while we are awake. Blood flow decreases to the brain, and is redirected toward the muscles, restoring physical energy. Immune functions also increase.
Stage 4: REM sleep or Dream Sleep – This occurs at about 70 to 90 minutes into the sleep cycle. The average person usually has about three to five REM episodes per night. This stage is where learning and memories are solidified, stress is released and emotions are processed. Breathing is rapid and shallow, eyes dart under eyelids, heart rate increases, and blood pressure rises.
These stages are why most experts recommend never ever using your snooze button. Since it takes about an hour to reach the stages where real rest occurs, stopping short only to be woken up again by a blaring alarm is going to leave you more tired than if you just got up in the first place. Easier said than done, of course. I found this out a while ago, and am still having trouble leaving my snooze button alone.
The Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock takes the snooze ban a step further and actually determines, based on your movements, which part of your cycle you are in and, thus, the best time to wake you up. Don’t worry about it letting you sleep through that morning meeting, though. You set your alarm, and in the 30 minutes leading up to your alarm, the app analyzes your movements and wakes you up at the best point in your sleep cycle, so you rise fresh as a daisy, instead of a coffee-crazed commute hazard.
It doesn’t take the place of a good night’s sleep, but it will make waking up a little easier by simply shifting your alarm a few minutes ahead or behind your set time. Some may grumble they don’t want to wake up any earlier, but if your felt more refreshed and ready for the day, those extra minutes don’t really matter, right? And that’s precisely the point.
Photo via Source
