Sleep Cycles

Usually I am up too early to need an alarm. But on Saturdays, when I need to get myself together and going early for my 9:00 class, I set the alarm for 5:30. Even though the class isn't until 9:00, I leave home no later than 8:00 -- and my preference is to be presentable: showered, caffeinated, dressed in something semi-nice. Some days the "caffeinated" part takes a long time. I actually used to teach 8:00 classes (at the university where I taught full-time, which was much closer to my house), and I was often in my office by 7:00. But then again, in that timeframe I woke up on a regular basis around 4:00 or 4:30. I'm glad not to do that anymore!

My young associate told me about a sleep cycle alarm clock, and my son mentioned it more recently. The idea is that the alarm will wake you up sometime within a half-hour before you need to get up, at your lightest point of sleep. I haven't noticed much difference, but the sound is pleasant enough. A bonus -- or detriment, I haven't quite decided yet -- is that it also retains and graphs information about how long you sleep, how much you move, and your "best" and "worst" nights. I assume that information is determined by how much you toss and turn, as well as how long you sleep. When I first started using it, I was confused about when to turn it on; my "best" day shows up as about eight hours of sleep, with lots of deep sleep. I turned on the alarm before I got in bed, so I wasn't actually sleeping all that time, and the "deep sleep" it recorded was during the time I wasn't even in bed. (I guess it's activated by movement; when you're in a deep sleep phase, you move less. I'm pretty sure there's no actual brainwave measurement going on.

After the first week of using it just on class days, I started using it every day. I tend to be competitive, especially with myself, so I was fascinated by all the ups and downs of the graph and kept trying to sleep better. If you aren't a good sleeper, you know that nothing exacerbates that situation like trying to do it more and better. So now I wonder if the app itself is keeping me from sleeping well, if I'm stressing out about beating my "best" night on the app, or if just having my phone in my bed messes with my sleep. The answer to that query is unlikely to be discovered, as it presents something of a Catch-22 situation: If I don't use the app, I can't measure my sleep. If my sleep improves, I won't know because it won't have been measured. The other big problem is that, while I can see that I don't usually sleep well (assuming the app is accurate), I'm not given any suggestions on how to sleep better. That might be the better solution to pursue.