It’s called Sleep Cycle and simply put, it’s amazing. The app is an alarm that wakes you up within a 30-minute window of when you want to be awoken. The catch? The alarm goes off when you’re in your lightest stage of sleep, causing you to wake up happier than you normally would.
A standard alarm gives no thought as to what stage of sleep you’re in, but Sleep Cycle does. When you’re in a light stage of sleep, you move around more; when you’re in a deep stage of sleep (stage 4 or REM), your movements become sparse or nonexistent entirely until you fall back into a lighter stage of sleep. And, as studies have shown, we wake up happier and easier when we’re awoken during our lightest sleep stage, which is exactly what Sleep Cycle aims to do.
How, you ask? Each smartphone is equipped with a small device called an accelerometer, which can sense the motions of the phone. (Hence why you can play interactive games that require you to tilt the phone around.) By placing your phone face down on your bed, the app is able to sense your movements throughout the night and, come morning, will wake you up within a 30-minute window during your lightest stage of sleep. And yes, there is a snooze function in case the alarm wakes you up before you’re willing to actually get up.
When you do finally shut the alarm off, you’ll be greeted with a graph of your sleep pattern for that night, along with a few other statistics. Here’s an example taken from my night of sleep on Sunday, November 23rd.
While the app’s purpose is to wake you up in your lightest sleep phase, some of my favorite features have nothing to do with the initial design.
For example, the app tracks what time you set the alarm each night. Over the course of a year or more, it’s quite interesting to see how this fluctuates. When I first entered college (in August 2013), I went to bed noticeably later than when I was still in high school. Likewise, this past summer I went to bed much earlier than usual because I needed to be to work by 7:00 a.m. every day.
Another amazing feature is its ability to track how certain daily behaviors affect your sleep pattern. For example, if you worked out that day or drank coffee. While many actions or decisions we make throughout the day seem insignificant, they may actually be having an affect on our sleep quality. Which, apparently for me means going to bed late affects my sleep quality negatively.
There are many more features, but these are the ones that intrigue me the most. I seriously encourage everyone to purchase this incredible app (only $0.99, a small price to pay considering everything it offers). I use it every night and have woken up happier and more rested than ever before. To download and discover your own sleep statistics, simply go to the app store!