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Not trying to give a personal plug (well, maybe a little bit), but I wrote a bed time calculator that might count as a pretty cool 'sleep hack'. The idea is th

Not trying to give a personal plug (well, maybe a little bit), but I wrote a bed time calculator that might count as a pretty cool 'sleep hack'. The idea is that it counts backwards in sleep cycles from the time your alarm has to go off so that you wake up during a light phase of sleep. Waking up in light sleep (vs deep sleep) will let you wake up feeling more awake, alert and refreshed. If you're interested, the URL is http://sleepyti.me http://sleepyti.me I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions about the page, so if you have any feel free to let me know!

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
It assumes everyone has a sleep cycle of 90 minutes, but I believe sleep cycles get shorter through the night.
- david_shaw 16y ago
  I've heard interesting comments from both sides of this issue. Some people say that sleep cycles get longer as the night goes on, while others say that they get gradually shorter. Although I was originally going to try to compensate for this variation, I instead decided to go with the average sleep cycle times instead. There is always going to be some variance in the length of cycles (usually between about 75 minutes and about 110 minutes), but the average is pretty well documented to be about an hour and a half. Although it's definitely true that some people will have drastically differently timed sleep cycles, this is usually due to some other neurological condition. My theory is that short of that, the law of averages will help me out :)
  - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
    Well, suppose I need to get up at 07:30. It advises me to go to sleep at 22:30, which is 9 hours, or 6 cycles. If I'm out by just 10 minutes, that's an hour. So perhaps I should go to sleep at 21:30. Or at 23:30. There's a big difference. I do love the idea - the challenge it trying to work out whether I'm average. 8-)
jonhendry 16y ago
The flaw there is that it's often hard to control when you fall asleep. There's a watch on the market that monitors your movements in order to spot when you're lightly sleeping. You can set an alarm, and a window of time before that alarm. If, during that window of time, the watch detects you moving, it'll go off then. Otherwise, it'll go off at the specified time even if you're deep asleep.
- david_shaw 16y ago
  I believe that there's also an iPhone application that will use the accelerometer to figure out when you're moving the most during the time frame in which you're supposed to wake up. The increased movement implies lighter sleep, and that will trigger the alarm to wake up. The idea with http://sleepyti.me http://sleepyti.me is basically to emulate this without the need for external hardware. I'm in the same boat as you--that is, I have trouble actually falling asleep sometimes. I originally had 'time to fall asleep' option that would allow the user to specify how long it usually took to fall asleep. Unfortunately, no one really ever used it. It's a lot easier to say "the average human takes fourteen minutes to fall asleep," than to try to calculate that in beforehand. My advice is to give yourself a half hour or so to fall asleep. If it's been longer than that and you're still awake, get up, walk around, go back to bed in 15 minutes (and recalculate from sleepyti.me!). Research says that laying in bed longer than a half hour while awake will actually make insomnia worse. If you're sitting in bed for over a half an hour every night, you might consider talking to a doctor about sleep aids. It helps me sleep better just to know that I could take an Ambien if I need to.
  - snow_mac 16y ago
    I personally use some sleepy time tea before bed, and a fan during sleep for white noise. Tea: http://www.celestialseasonings.com/products/detail.html/herbal-teas/sleepytime http://www.celestialseasonings.com/products/detail.html/herb...

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

It assumes everyone has a sleep cycle of 90 minutes, but I believe sleep cycles get shorter through the night.

david_shaw 16y ago
I've heard interesting comments from both sides of this issue. Some people say that sleep cycles get longer as the night goes on, while others say that they get gradually shorter. Although I was originally going to try to compensate for this variation, I instead decided to go with the average sleep cycle times instead. There is always going to be some variance in the length of cycles (usually between about 75 minutes and about 110 minutes), but the average is pretty well documented to be about an hour and a half. Although it's definitely true that some people will have drastically differently timed sleep cycles, this is usually due to some other neurological condition. My theory is that short of that, the law of averages will help me out :)
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  Well, suppose I need to get up at 07:30. It advises me to go to sleep at 22:30, which is 9 hours, or 6 cycles. If I'm out by just 10 minutes, that's an hour. So perhaps I should go to sleep at 21:30. Or at 23:30. There's a big difference. I do love the idea - the challenge it trying to work out whether I'm average. 8-)

jonhendry 16y ago

The flaw there is that it's often hard to control when you fall asleep. There's a watch on the market that monitors your movements in order to spot when you're lightly sleeping. You can set an alarm, and a window of time before that alarm. If, during that window of time, the watch detects you moving, it'll go off then. Otherwise, it'll go off at the specified time even if you're deep asleep.

david_shaw 16y ago
I believe that there's also an iPhone application that will use the accelerometer to figure out when you're moving the most during the time frame in which you're supposed to wake up. The increased movement implies lighter sleep, and that will trigger the alarm to wake up. The idea with http://sleepyti.me http://sleepyti.me is basically to emulate this without the need for external hardware. I'm in the same boat as you--that is, I have trouble actually falling asleep sometimes. I originally had 'time to fall asleep' option that would allow the user to specify how long it usually took to fall asleep. Unfortunately, no one really ever used it. It's a lot easier to say "the average human takes fourteen minutes to fall asleep," than to try to calculate that in beforehand. My advice is to give yourself a half hour or so to fall asleep. If it's been longer than that and you're still awake, get up, walk around, go back to bed in 15 minutes (and recalculate from sleepyti.me!). Research says that laying in bed longer than a half hour while awake will actually make insomnia worse. If you're sitting in bed for over a half an hour every night, you might consider talking to a doctor about sleep aids. It helps me sleep better just to know that I could take an Ambien if I need to.
- snow_mac 16y ago
  I personally use some sleepy time tea before bed, and a fan during sleep for white noise. Tea: http://www.celestialseasonings.com/products/detail.html/herbal-teas/sleepytime http://www.celestialseasonings.com/products/detail.html/herb...