A few weeks ago, I installed the Sleep Cycle application on my iPhone. The principle of Sleep Cycle: you start up the application. You indicate at what time you need to be up. Then you put your iPhone (in plane mode, to minimize radiation) next to your pillow before bed. The same kind of application exists for Android.
The application works with the iPhone’s accelerometer recording the movements of the mattress. At the end of the night you get a recording, with some interpretation, like so.
Went to bed / woke up: 23:25 / 06:31
Total time: 7h 06m
It wakes you up when you’re starting to emerge, based on your movements, in the half hour interval preceding the alarm time you set.
Of course, the nerd in me was absolutely fascinated at first. In theory, you could check which kind of sleep would correspond to which state of mind the next day, and it’s just fun. And if it worked, it could make waking up just that little bit easier.
After a while, however, i got frustrated.
First off, in dream state (REM sleep) you don’t move, in theory. It’s only a short time anyway, and during that time just your eyes move, rapidly, as the name indicates.
Secondly, you have sleep cycles of about 3 hours at a time. Deep sleep, REM, deep sleep. A night having about 6 of them couldn’t be right. Errata: sleep cycles are actually 1h30 to 2h30
Thirdly, the smart alarm thing didn’t seem to work. Sometimes, I would wake up, check the time, without the alarm being activated.
And mostly, the moral aspect. It did make me that little bit more anxious. Without the application, I would just get up, and drag myself to the shower, no questions asked. With Sleep Cycle, the first thing I’d do was look at the previous night, and try to divine whether I’d actually slept well, looking at the statistics. Being a bit disgruntled when there was a lot of movement, and trying to decide whether it was something I’d eaten.
So I decided to give it up. There’s a whole movement out there about monitoring your own vitals. It’s understandable, we like control. But I’m starting to think that maybe, it’s wiser to just live, without anything telling us how we ought to feel.
Dr NakaMats from Japan got the Ig Nobel of nutrition because he took a picture of his meal and evaluate it every day during 34 years. In this way he knows what to eat to feel good. He is now 83 and says he is going to be144 ! He takes one meal a day and sleeps 4 ours!
maybe that’s good, although it doesn’t seem very sane to me.
however, in the case of sleep, I think, the less you think about it, the better.
just try the low tech approach, A pen and a paper. Note the time you go to bed (you have to fall asleep immediately, not an issue for me but not for everyone) and note the time you wake up naturally. If you remember the end of a dream it’s a good sign that you were in the right moment to wake up, the minute of “wake” between cycles, which are the best moments to wake up because you are already.. awake. You’ll notice after a few times that you always get the exact same number. Your body has a clock. A chemical clock, almost an atomic one. Now you can find the least common divider of the duration and it gives you your personal sleep cycle length. Between 1h30 and 2h30 for 95% of population. Some manage to shorten their cycle to 1h. 4 cycles is enough. Since that day, I’ve never put my alarm clock again. I always know exactly when I’ll wake up the next morning. Fully rested. Be warned though, caffeine an alcohol tends to fuck up the pattern. BTW the pattern your “smart” phone gives you seems bullshit to me. The big deep sleep before the wake up is probably a bug
Interesting concept for an application, actually. But your observations are right. There’s no way for an accelerometer on the mattress to detect deep sleep or REM sleep. All it can do is make an educated guess based on how much you’re moving. If you have a good box spring mattress, the thing should even tell you you’re dead, because one spring might work independent from the others. Monitoring all sorts of vital signs can be useful in certain situations, but a certain degree of accuracy is required. This is just spielerei.
Good night
Philippe: impressed by the study you put into it. You’re right about a sleep cycle, it’s more like 1.5 to 2 indeed.
I’ll try to monitor my sleep like that … ideally one should have some room to experiment, but life often interferes.
“The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.”
-Gaston Bachelard