Sleep is such a basic need that without it, we literally become different people. Forget about being grumpy or out of sorts: lack of sleep can make you act like you’re legally drunk. Women who sleep less are more likely to gain weight, and too little sleep in both men and women can make you more susceptible to serious health issues.
In the past insomniacs were stuck counting sheep, drinking glass after glass of milk, or engaging in wild exercise – though not too close to bedtime – in order to somehow tire themselves out.
Nowadays, however, the solution to the 10-15% of people who suffer from sleep problems could be as close as your smartphone, as the apps below demonstrate.
Sleep Genius
The founder of Advanced Brain Technologies, Alex Doman, says the best way to get a good night’s sleep is for your mother to pick you up and rock you. However, since most of us are well beyond the ages of being rocked, Doman claims that his Sleep Genius app allows your iPhone or iPad to get to sleep by cradling and rocking you “as if your mother is putting you to sleep.”
If that sounds strange, then consider the sheer number of people suffering from various sleep related problems, and the various health disorders – both physical and psychological – that lack of sleep causes. Doman explains that difficulty sleeping is really a symptom of
a bigger issue: the failure of the brain and body to synchronize your 24 hour body clock.
The Sleep Genius aims to fix that by training your brain to reset your 24 hour body clock. The app works on four fronts: It helps you get to sleep by using pink noise to block out distracting sounds, and relax you by lowering your your breathing and heart rate.
The addition of psychoacoustic music relaxes your brain, while the binaural beats help you stay asleep by training your brian to copy the brain waves common to various sleep stages. Even more surprising, the app uses neurosensory algorithms to trick your brain into thinking you’re being rocked to sleep.
Naturespace: Relax, Meditate, Sleep
If training your brain makes you worry about scary subliminal messages and other such stuff, you might want to consider Naturespace. Naturespace’s recordings are more than just sounds of nature. Using 3D technology created especially for headphones, Naturespace sounds of nature make it seem as if you’re actually there. There are 6 free sounds, and you can download more for a reasonable price for at their online catalog.
I stumbled across Naturespace nearly three years ago, and was surprised by the amount of effort the team goes to in order to put together a cool listening experience. In order to capture sounds like a pack of wolves howling, or the wind rushing through canyons, they actually travel out to each site and spend several days recording the sounds from all angles.
With seamless loops, excellent recording quality, and amazing sounds – in some you actually feel as if you’re there- this app is a great choice not just in helping you get to sleep more easily, but anytime you want calm, restful ambient sound. I use their tracks while listening to my AVS machine, or when I want a little background sound that won’t distract me while I’m writing.
You can listen to a free sample here, but make sure you have your headphones on, so you can get the full 3D effect.
Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock
The Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock is an app that uses your iPhone to monitor your sleep cycles. The idea behind it is that a regular alarm clock can wake you in the middle of a deep sleep phase, leaving you feeling like death warmed over for the rest of the day.
With the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock, on the other hand, the app will wake you during your lightest sleep phase. The only disadvantage is that you won’t wake up exactly at the time you set the clock: there is a 30 minute window of time in which the alarm will go off.
Also, even though there are more than 12 go to sleep sounds to choose from, some might get bored with the same sounds; you can use your downloaded music instead if this bothers you.
The app also gives you a reading on the quality of your sleep, and you can take notes to keep track of any outside factors that might have affected your sleep. To get an idea of what your sleep is like over days, weeks, or months, use the graph function to get a picture of your sleep pattterns over a longer period of time. Power users who like to examine the data in more depth: you can download your data in Excel and fiddle with the data to your heart’s content.
Sleepbot
Sleepbot is similar to Sleep Cycle, and has apps for both the iOs market and Android. It does, however, offer you the option to use the advanced features, or use Sleepbox Classic, which simply tracks the number of hours you sleep.
Deep Sleep With Andrew Johnson
Deep Sleep is less technowild and more back to basics. The principle: use a series of visualizations and relaxation techniques to help people fall asleep naturally. Deep Sleep‘s Andrew Johnson is a clinical hynotherapist based in England, explains that the app is meant to help you build a natural, healthy sleeping pattern rather than forcibly train your brain to regulate itself.
You can use the app not only to help you get to sleep, but also to help you get back to sleep if you tend to wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling back asleep again.
Whatever app you choose, researchers who study sleep disorders say there’s no guarantee that any of them work. Some sleep specialists, in fact, go so far as to say that while many sleep apps are useful in that they give the user more information about their sleep patterns, none of them have actually been proved to work in clinical trials.
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