As a college student, getting enough sleep is a nightly struggle. A good night's rest is always losing to the ever-present power struggle with classes, studying and extracurricular activities. But did you know there's an app for that?
Enter Sleep Cycle, which according to the app's developers, Maciek Drejak Labs, is a "bio-alarm clock" that wakes you up during your lightest phase of sleep by tracking your sleep patterns.
Students who have taken a psychology class know that human sleep patterns register in waves; we are constantly oscillating from light sleep to deep sleep throughout the night. By utilizing the iPhone's movement-sensing accelerometer, Sleep Cycle can determine your sleep patterns for the night by measuring how much you move while you sleep. In order for the Apple-only app to catch your movement, you must place your phone face down on the bed by your pillow.
But what does calculating sleep movement have to do with feeling more rested? Before you go to sleep, you select a 30-minute time frame in which to be woken up the next morning. By tracking movement throughout the night, Sleep Cycle can define when your body is most awake in the morning and wake you at that point during your selected time frame. According to the Sleep Cycle's App Store front, waking up while in your lightest sleep phase is the "natural way to wake up feeling rested and relaxed."
I can certainly appreciate the waking up problem Sleep Cycle is trying to tackle. Parents, siblings and friends can at- test that I'm notoriously terrible at waking up. When my alarm goes off, all I can think about is hitting snooze until the last second, no matter what productive plans I have.
But does it actually work? As with many things, the answer is unclear. When I first started using Sleep Cycle, I was actually looking forward to waking up to see if I'd found my new miracle worker. After those few days though, the excitement wore off and I was again dreading my early morning wakeup calls.
However, my 99 cents spent in the App Store was not lost. Since Sleep Cycle keeps track of your sleep patterns, it records the data of how many hours you sleep per night. While it's easy to simply calculate hours slept by looking at a clock before you go to sleep and when you wake up, Sleep Cycle incorporates a few features that make knowing long- term sleeping patterns useful.
Before you set your alarm, you can add "sleep notes" to the night, which will tag each night with activities that might promote or reduce sleep. Possible sleep notes include "drank coffee," "took a nap," "consumed alcohol" and "stressed out," although you can tailor your own to personal preferences.
After consistently tagging nights, Sleep Cycle creates numerous graphs that can be quite useful to anyone who is lacking sleep and wants to know what a possible cause might be. Perhaps you'll discover those four-hour nights of sleep are due to an afternoon cappuccino.
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