Getting a good night’s sleep is vital to daily mental and physical health. But what if you’re trying as hard as you can and still face difficulty heading to bed every night? Or, what if you’d like a reliable way to get more insight into your sleeping habits and patterns, but aren’t sure how to do so? Luckily, in this age of technology, there’s a smartphone application for just about anything! Here are our picks for the 4 best apps for a better night’s sleep.
1. Sleep Cycle
Sleep Cycle is an alarm clock application that makes use of your phone’s microphone in order to track your sleep in a reliable manner. Essentially, the app aims to track the sleep patterns you go through so that it can wake you up during your light sleep phase. This will allow you to awake feeling refreshed and not groggy.
The app determines what phase you’re in by analyzing the sounds and noises that the microphone picks up from you. All you need to do is set a 30-minute window during which you’d like to be woken up – for example, between 6 and 6:30 in the morning – and the app will wake you up in a gentle manner during your light sleep phase. If you don’t want to wake up when it alerts you, you can double tap your phone to snooze.
With this app also comes a series of helpful dashboards that contain analyses of the statistics and data gathered during your sleep. This includes graphs and charts of your sleep phases, sleep quality, waking times, and even snoring tracking. The application is available for both iOS and Android devices.
2. Pzizz
Pzizz is an application designed to help promote relaxation, allowing you to swiftly and easily fall into a relaxed sleep, stay in that sleep healthily, and wake up feeling well-rested and fresh. It’s useful for both full nights of sleep and short power naps during the daytime.
The app works through the use of sound effects. Essentially, it plays different noises and sounds, from music to effects and from narration to beats, which you can customize certain aspects of. This includes options for focus type settings that allow you to play music in bursts. With more than one hundred billion varying sound effects, the resulting soundtrack is made specifically to soothe you into sleep and keep you there for as long as desired.
The science behind this application lies in psychoacoustics, as well as intuitive neurolinguistic programming and binaural sounds. The app was created with the help of prior studies and research in order to create a tailored listening and relaxation experience. You can download the application for iOS and Android phones.
3. Sleep Time
Sleep Time, which works similarly to Sleep Cycle, is constructed in order to allow you to track sleeping data while ensuring you wake up during your light sleep phase in a relaxed manner. This will allow you to feel more refreshed, getting rid of excess drowsiness often felt in the morning.
In addition to just tracking sleep and acting as a peaceful alarm clock, Sleep Time also offers soundscapes, like gentle rain or waves. These soundscapes create sounds that make you feel like you are in a more natural environment, promoting faster falling asleep and helping you through each individual sleep cycle seamlessly.
The app makes use of a unique and reliable algorithm in order to properly analyze and present you with accurate data regarding your sleeping schedule. It takes note of your movements using your phone’s accelerometer and creates charts and graphs that explain the data it accumulates, presenting them on a dashboard. Through this, you can note your cycles, patterns, and trends. You can get the app for both iOS and Android devices.
4. Pillow
Pillow is a cleanly designed application that tracks sleep and acts as an alarm clock. It works by detecting your movements and sounds, using it to map out your sleep cycles in an accurate manner. All its workings are based entirely on the most modern findings that research has to offer, ensuring it is up to date on how to help you sleep best.
The application very meticulously tracks your different phases of sleep, churning out diagrams and statistics that are very detailed for you to look over. It will then choose the most optimal time to wake you up in the window you select, whether you’re going for a long night’s sleep or a nap.
Unfortunately, Pillow is only available for iOS phones, but it is still a highly useful app that can help better your nightly sleep. Being made specifically for these devices also means that it has been successfully integrated with the Apple Health application. Not only does this streamline your data, but it allows Pillow to collect information from the Health app. This can allow for better analyses of how different variables affect the quality of your sleep – like your weight, calorie intake, blood pressure, and caffeine consumption.
Conclusion
Sleep is more important than many of us realize. Without it, you’ll be moodier, less focused, more tired, and less productive during the day. In fact, according to Sleepedia, prolonged lack of sleep can even lead to a plethora of serious health complications. As such, it’s incredibly important to focus on achieving healthy sleep, and these applications can help you in that mission.
Photograph by CongerDesign