Sleep Cycle is an app that turns you iPhone into a bio-alarm clock. Using the accelerometer built into the iPhone it reads specific movements common during sleep and wakes you up when you are sleeping lightly, aiming to give you a more refreshing awakening. Haven’t we all felt the frustration of being woken up during an especially interesting dream, and then felt dreadful for the day because of it?

This type of movement based bio-alarm clock has been around for awhile. You often find them as glorified watches with internal accelerometers, or overcomplicated devices that require placing motion detecting electrodes under your pillow case. The reason bio-alarm clocks work is due to the extensive sleep research that tells us how our body moves or doesn’t move during sleep.

How Does It Work?

Software like Sleep Cycle looks out for the right breathing patterns or muscle activity to determine what stage of sleep we are at. For example, during the REM stage of sleep (when we are dreaming) your body is essentially paralysed, this stops your body from acting out and hurting itself during a dream, but during light sleep your muscles will occasionally twitch. Another example is how during the deepest stage of sleep your breathing becomes rhythmic, but during REM sleep your breathing is rapid and shallow. These are distinct and measurable differences and are the biological indicators that bio-alarm clocks are looking out for.

The Sleep Cycle app on the iPhone doesn’t just wake you up though; it also produces a graph of your sleep pattern, so you get a general idea of how restful your sleep was. These graphs are more of a novelty than anything else and though I wouldn’t recommend you use them to make inferences about how healthy your sleeping behaviour is, it could provide you with a valuable insight when paired with keeping track of your routines, helping you to figure out what works best for you for a good night’s sleep.

I would argue that if you’re tweeting, you’re certainly not trying to sleep or doing what’s good for your body in preparation for shutting down for a few hours. I myself have suffered some restless nights and made a real effort to combat the problem, rather than accepting it and suffering through more zombie like days in the office.

Turn Off Your Computer 30 Minutes Before Sleep

If you’re suffering from occasional difficulty getting to sleep at night you should consider the effects of using a computer late at night. Studies have shown that the brain remains stimulated after using a computer (or watching television), which in turn makes your sleep restless. The simple act of shutting down the computer 30 minutes before you’re planning on going to sleep can help relax you.

Research has also shown that the bright light of your computer monitor (let’s also not forget that mobile phone screens also produce a bright light) suppresses the production of our sleep hormone melatonin. If you are suffering from an especially bad case of insomnia then try shutting down the computer at least two hours before planning on going to bed.

Though you may enjoy the calming effects of using the computer, your brain on the other hand is thinking “light = daytime”. Staring at your computer screen means keeping yourself alert and wide-awake and returning online to complain about your inability to sleep is simply aggravating the problem.

If you are used to the routine of using the computer right up until bedtime, try to create a new routine for yourself. Use the last 30 minutes of your day to read a chapter out of that book you’ve been meaning to finish, to relax in the shower, to tidy up your apartment. Stick to the new routine and see if it helps improve your sleep.

Is checking if anyone has replied to your latest tweet or commented on your blog really worth loosing sleep over?

Avoid Caffeine Within 6 Hours of Bedtime

Coffee. Internet users are it’s biggest fan, but it does more harm than good to you in the evenings.

Caffeine is a short term solution if you are low on sleep and need to remain active, it blocks adenosine reception so you feel alert, and injects adrenaline into your system to give you a boost. The trouble is, that the half-life of caffeine in your body is around six hours. Consider a cup of coffee at 6pm, half the caffeine in that cup will still be floating around in your body at midnight. By avoiding caffeine within at least 6 hours of your bedtime you’re giving yourself a better chance at being able to fall asleep and the less caffeine in your body the better your sleep will be.

Also, excessive caffeine consumption has a negative effect on your digestive system, so you may suffer from heartburn when you try to sleep at night. Coffee (even decaf!) reduces the pressure on the valve between the esophagus and the stomach so that the acidic contents of the stomach pass up to the esophagus leading to heartburn, which is far harder to cure when you’re lying down as it’s even easier for that acid to travel to your esophagus.

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If the above two tips don’t work for you, I would recommend talking to your doctor as persistent insomnia can have detrimental effects on your physical and mental well being.

You can also try the following guidelines:

• Get up at the same time every day, even at weekends. Irregular sleep patterns undermines your ability to sleep.
• Avoid daytime activities in bed (like eating or watching TV) but reading before bed may be helpful.
• Do not smoke before bedtime, nicotine is a stimulant and just like caffeine it can disturb your sleep.
• Avoid alcohol within four hours of bedtime, though it may induce sleep it makes sleep more fragile and broken throughout the night.
• If you are unable to sleep, leave your bed and engage in a quiet activity elsewhere (not TV or using the computer) and return to bed when you feel sleepy again.
• Go to bed only when you are sleepy. Do not extend your bedtime hours in the hope of sleeping longer, in most cases you may be awake for longer.
• Exercise. People who take regular exercise sleep better than those of us sitting in-front of our computer screen 12 hours a day.