If there's one thing that I feel passionate about health-wise, it's getting enough sleep. I know how important sleep is for not only my physical body functioning, but also for my state of mind. When I'm sleep deprived, I hate how on-edge I feel throughout the day, not to mention how less productive I am when all I can think about is when I'll be hitting the pillow.
Luckily, I don't tend to have any problems going to sleep, staying asleep, or getting enough sleep regularly, but I know that this reality isn't true for everyone. Just two weeks ago, The CDC called insufficient sleep a "public health problem," thanks to staggering statistics of sleep deprivation, short sleep durations, and unhealthy sleep-related behaviors, like falling asleep during the day unintentionally or even falling asleep while driving. Guys, do I really need to go on about how important it is to get enough sleep?
Luckily, there are many apps that have come into fruition to help us practice better sleep hygiene and to understand our own sleeping patterns. Figuring out your own sleeping patterns can help you to gain insight on how you can best use your resting time and how you can change your habits to improve your quality of sleep. So, let's take a look at nine of these apps that will help you sleep!
1. The Sleep Smart Alarm Clock
This app does a lot to help improve the quality of your sleep, as it not only helps you to find a wake up time that will optimize your sleep, but will then show you how efficient your sleep process was once you get up. If you want to get more of that deep sleep that is so restorative to your brain and body, this is the app for you.
2. Rain, Rain
This might seem like a strange app to include in a list of apps about sleep, but this is one of my personal favorites! I always fall asleep to a rain soundtrack on this app on my phone, because it's soothing for one thing, but also because the routine helps me to fall asleep quickly; when I hear the soundtrack my body knows it time to sleep. I've found that I fall asleep a lot faster this way. You can also use this to help trigger yourself to sleep, like if you're on an airplane and want to pass out.
3. Awoken
If you want to better remember your dreams or even try to practice lucid dreaming, where you can control your dreams, you can use Awoken to help you to explore your dreams. The app has a dream journal you can use to record your dreams from the night before. It doesn't stop there though, as the app will even analyze your dreams based on common themes in your journal entries that emerge. It also plays certain audio cues that can help to trigger lucid dreaming while you're asleep. How cool is this, guys?
4. SleepTime+
If you love to analyze your behaviors, you'll be obsessed with SleepTime+. The app has both an optimization alarm clock and a heavy duty sleep analyzer to help you understand your sleep quality. If you want to get a much higher quality of sleep than you're currently getting in, definitely give this app a go.
5. Yoga For Insomnia
Did you know that yoga can be used as a cure for insomnia? Yep, it's true and this app is designed specifically for using yoga to help you to sleep. Yoga for Insomnia uses traditional hatha yoga poses and techniques to help relax your mind and body to help you to achieve a restful state.
6. Pzizz
Are you the kind of person who likes to nap in the middle of the day? I myself love a good nap, but often find that I end up sleeping longer than I had wanted to. Pzizz is here to help to solve that problem, as it helps to regulate your napping to ensure that you wake up feeling rested and rejuvenated, rather than groggy and even more tired than before.
7. Pillow
Pillow not only comes with sleep analysis and audio recording features, but what I think is best of all are their pleasant alarm clock sound options. I dread hearing the blare of my iPhone alarm in the morning and with the soothing alarm setting options in Pillow, I won't have to! The app is also compatible with Apple Health and will allow you to go even deeper if you buy the premium version, which includes everything from a mood analysis to detailed sleep statistics.
8. Count Sheep HD
It might sound kind of silly, but this app will give you a literal way to count sheep! It's created especially to be used in dark rooms and even comes with soothing music that will play in the background to help you drift back into dreamland. Could anything be more cute than this?
9. Harmony Hypnosis Meditation
This app may be my favorite of the bunch, since the idea is to help you learn how to hypnotize yourself so that you can fall and stay asleep all night. How it works is that you simply listen to a guided hypnosis meditation one time each day for five days and then see the difference in how you fall asleep. If you're skeptical, the app has really rave reviews from users, so it seems like this hypnosis technique actually works! If you're already not getting enough sleep, you basically have nothing to lose except for sleep deprivation.
Images: Pexels; Sleep Smart Alarm Clock, Rain Rain, SleepTime+ , Pillow, Count Sheep HD, Harmony Hypnosis Meditation/iTunes; Awoken, Pzizz/Google Play
