Sleeping is the one constant that everyone has to do on a daily basis. Today at Tech2U we will go over the best sleeping apps to help you find the better Z’s at night.
Runtastic has an amazing app Sleep Better which hosts a list of cool features. By putting your phone next to your pillow, the app uses the accelerometer to monitor motion you make during the night. By analyzing this motion, Sleep Better can get an accurate view on your sleeping habits. The app will track your sleep and give you detailed logs to better pinpoint areas of improvement. You can enter in your life habits such as caffeine and alcohol consumption as well as stress levels to see how they affect your sleep. Sleep Better can be found on the app store and is a cool $0.
If waking up every morning is the bane of your existence than Sleep Cycle is the app for you. Sleep Cycle aims to find the perfect time to wake you up in the mornings. By monitoring your sleep behavior, it can track which sleep cycle you are in and pinpoint the opportune time to sound the alarm. Waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle is what causes extreme grogginess in the morning while waking up in a shallower cycle will make you feel refreshed in the morning. Sleep Cycle makes waking up in a transitional sleep cycle much easier leading to mornings of bliss and happiness and can be found on the app store for free.
Falling asleep can be a challenge and nothing is worse than sitting in bed all night counting those sheep. Relax and Sleep Well have an app aimed at taking the stress away called Hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy guides the users with hypnosis and includes 3 free sessions with the app and additional sessions can be in-app purchased.
Although there is no definitive proof that tracking your sleep can help, there is always value in knowledge. These apps are sure to help you see problem areas and offer great amount of insight into your daily sleeping.
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App of the week:
Elevate is a cool app with the goal of working out your brain. It uses a variety of games that test your skills in different areas including reading, grammar and even speaking. The free version of the app gives you access to 16 games that change everyday, while the paid version gives you access to any game at anytime and an additional 8 games. Elevate Pro is $5 a month or $45 dollars a year.
Video Transcription:
Man: …Disease Control and Prevention found that 35% of adults get less than 7 hours of sleep each night. So if you’re like Amy, burning the candle at both ends, Mike Wisby from Tech2U is here to share some apps that can help you get a good night sleep. I would assume going to bed before midnight is a start.
Mike: That would help.
Man: And so we’ll start with that. How about any apps, would that help?
Mike: Yes, so there’s a few apps that can help you track your sleep so you can learn a bit more how to get a better sleep. These days, smartphones have an accelerometer. It’s [inaudible 00:00:36]. It tracks your movement.
Man: It’s that thing? Okay. [inaudible 00:00:39].
Mike: It helps you sleep better because what you can do is place the phone on your bed, and what that will do, that will track the movements and record the sounds that are happening in your bedroom overnight. So there’s a few apps that can help you with that. We have Sleep Better by Runtastic. It’s $1.99, and that will do the same thing. All these apps kind of record what’s going on in your room.
Man: Like $1.99?
Mike: It’s a $1.99.
Man: Okay, $199 scared me.
Mike: Yeah, okay. I don’t think it’s going to be any app.
Man: Oh, that’s good.
Mike: But what that will then do is it will record and it’ll give you a breakdown of what’s happening in your room overnight. So if you have a snoring partner or if you have any restless pets that you sleep with in your bed.
Man: That could be causing it and you might not even know it.
Mike: You might not even know what’s going on and you might talk in your sleep or you might have restless…and then this will track that for you. But Sleep Better by Runtastic is pretty cool because an extra thing it does is it lets you enter your habits and variables like caffeine consumption, if you had a lot of alcohol, or even moon cycles, things like that, and then you can relate that to what your results are in the morning.
Man: It’s interesting. How can it detect motion?
Mike: So as I was saying, it has the ability…the phones now can track your movement. And they do that for like exercise and it counts your steps and things like that. So it’s monitoring vibrations in the bed.
Another really cool feature is a smart alarm option. So that’s going to not wake you up in the middle of a deep sleep cycle. So you have cycles…I’m not sure if you’re aware, but you have deep sleep and then half an hour and you go… So it’s going to wake you up when you’re not in a deep sleep. And Sleep Cycle is another app. Then that just basically does that and it’s completely free, free to do that. It doesn’t charge you anything for that. And the staff at Techradar, Wired, and the Wall Street Journal have actually done tests on that and they swear by it.
Man: No kidding, so that obviously was going to be my follow-up. How do you know for sure that these things actually work? Is it you have people who do it as an independent study and then it’s all verified?
Mike: Yeah, it’s basically these organizations have done studies on it and it shows that you do feel more relaxed, but there’s no real hard scientific evidence that it works. And you’ve also got to remember that the phone isn’t picking up the scientific data, so it’s not connected to your heartbeat and to your brain, so it doesn’t really know, it’s just guessing on…
Man: Okay. So it’s a somewhat educated guess.
Mike: Yeah, basically, yeah.
Man: So you always have a nice app of the day for us. What is it today?
Mike: Today it’s Elevate, and it’s like a personal trainer for your brain. It was actually Apple’s app of the year in 2014. It has games that are designed to improve your communication skills. And the free version actually includes 16 games. And they change daily, and they have a pro version, it’s about 45-50 bucks a year. And it actually gives you eight more games and you have access to all the games for any day you want. That’s pretty good and it keeps you smart. The games are designed to test your communication skills and give you reading and learning.
Man: Better stay away from that one. That’s good. Did you like Print back in the day, by the way?
Mike: Yes, yeah.
Man: Even over in Great Britain they liked…
Mike: He was very big and influential in Great Britain.
Man: I figured you were probably Tom Jones, Elton John, pretty much that too.
Mike: All the classics.
Man: All the classics. All right, Mike Wispy, Tech2U, thank you, my friend.
