Health experts tout all the things we should do to stay fit and well: eat organic low fat food, exercise regularly, get regular checkups, blah blah blah. I drank the purple kool-aid years ago on these recommendations but the one that I can’t implement is the “get 8 hours of sleep” action item.
Eating and exercise are things that are within my control; they are actionable items. Sleep is spontaneous, not actionable. Sure, there are all kinds of suggestions about how to get a better night’s sleep and how to optimize falling asleep but they are worthless to my awake brain.
Being the android-app driven geek I am, I searched for “getting better sleep app” and got several options. The app usually focused on the alarm clock: how you’re awakened affects the quality of you sleep and awake time. Hmm, I don’t have a problem with waking up, I have a problem with sleeping. After research and weighing of pricing, I settled on Sleep As Android.
Besides the “smart wake up” (alarm wakes you up at the optimal point in your sleep cycle), there are a host of stats telling me I don’t sleep much. There are many other features that I don’t use: lullaby mode, a captcha system (when the alarm goes off, you have to type in a code to make the alarm go off,) social sharing (like I need to share my nightly graphs with others?), snoring detection, lucid dreaming mode, and sleep advice. I find the sleep advice pretty funny: you need to go to bed by 9:25, you need to get more sleep. Duh.
If anything, this has been an entertainment app for me. It hasn’t improved my sleep but it is interesting to gather information.
