Sleep is one of the most important and essential things we need to function from one day to the next. And yet, most of us “Work Forest” students desperately rely on daily naps due to the lack of sleep we got the night before. We find ourselves spending long nights in the ZSR, trying to finish that paper due at 8 AM the next day, or frantically reading over a 60-page assignment for an anthropology class. Although naps can be helpful, waking up from an hour-long can leave us feeling tired and groggy, not to mention it’s an unhealthy habit to fall into.
*Image from Theatre 330
While the best advice would be to get more sleep at night (7-8 hours is the doctors’ order) sometimes we just don’t have that option. Fortunately there is a way to get minimal amounts of sleep while still being able to function properly.
Just a couple quick not-so-well known facts about sleep: on average, it takes someone 30 minutes to get into deep sleep and a full sleep cycle is only an hour and a half long. With this being said, sleeping for these quantified time periods can leave us feeling more refreshed than if we were to take a daily nap or only sleeping for five hours a night. When we only sleep for these time periods, we enter into a light sleep cycle, meaning most people don’t officially enter the REM stage of sleep. If you are woken up when in this deep REM sleep stage, even if you have slept enough hours, you will still wake up feeling tired. Luckily there is app that can calculate when each of us individually enters our lightest and deepest sleep stages. Having this knowledge, you can orchestrate a sleeping schedule for those four couple of days prior to Thanksgiving break, when teachers seem to be purposefully piling on the work.
Let me introduce you to Sleep Cycle, an app that can detect when you are in your lightest sleep and wake you up at the time so you always wake up feeling refreshed.
Basically you set a 30-minute time period around the time you want to wake up, place your phone in your bed, and sleep cycle will detect how much you move around and wake you up at the best time, allowing you to function well no matter how much sleep you get. Sleep Cycle also allows you to see the quality of your sleep, how much you sleep for and how much deep sleep you get per night. Not to mention the app is only $2.99, a bargain price for the benefit of waking up raring to go.
Let me be clear, I don’t want to urge students to rely on 30-minute naps or hour and half sleep cycles. As doctors recommend the best way to function is to get a recommended 7-10 hours of sleep a night. But, seeing as we are college students and schoolwork and social events are most pertinent to us, I realize this is not always possible. Only use this app when you need both sleep (obviously) and more hours in the day to finish up schoolwork.
No one likes feeling grumpy and groggy all day, plus dark circles are never an attractive look. With this app, you can make sure you’re completing everything you need to in a day while still maintaining the upbeat attitude sleep provides.