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.