Best Mobile Applications to Improve your Sleep

 

As 2016 draws closer to its end, the fact that there’s an app for everything nowadays rings truer than ever. However, as a quick glance through the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store will confirm, the focus is definitely on quantity rather than quality. There IS an app for everything now. There is an app that allows you to zip and unzip a zipper and that’s about all it does. There are even apps that (falsely) claim to charge your phone using solar power or help cure baldness with “special” frequencies.

Amazing, isn’t it?

Amidst all the noise, genuinely useful apps exist that can help you sleep. Today, we are going to go ahead and curate a list of apps that help you get to sleep faster and sleep better. From apps that play a variety of relaxing, atmospheric sounds to lull you to sleep, to apps that are smart enough to actively track your sleep patterns and maintain a log for you. From apps that use binaural beats to help you snooze, to apps that wake you up gradually over time instead of abruptly.

Let’s get started!

Best entry-level app

If you only have trouble sleeping sometimes but at other times you snooze just fine. Here is our top contender for someone who wants a no frills app to help him or her sleep.

 

 

Relax Melodies

 

This is a neat little app that gives you the option to drown out noise and distractions in your surroundings and helps you relax and focus on sleeping. It has a lot of high quality ambient sounds and binaural frequency audio to help you gently nod off to slumber. The best part is that you can create your own sounds by mixing up to 12 of the high quality sounds together. Play around with it a bit to see what suits you best. It also lets you save and store your mixes and has a neat timer feature that turns it off after the preset time period.

You can find it on Android or iOS.

 

For the mildly curious

If you want to have a veritable sleep assistant by your side, you can try out Sleep Cycle.

Sleep Cycle

Sleep cycle is one of the best sleeping assistant apps out there. It is an excellent all rounder sleeping aid app, that does quite a few things right. For starters, it uses your phones accelerometer readings during the night, to learn how you sleep and records data that you can view later on. One of the best features is its ability to gently wake you up within a window of time rather than waking you up abruptly by blaring an alarm. You see, we sleep in phases of high activity and low activity. We get our best sleep in the periods that we have low activity. Since the app monitors your sleep activity, it knows when your body’s activity during sleep is high and it starts to gently wake you up within that window. So, if you give it a time frame to wake you up between 6 to 6:30 a.m., what it’s going to do is pick the best time in that window to wake you up. You being gently awoken during a high activity period is bound to leave you feeling relaxed instead of shocking you awake.

Another feature is its ability to maintain detailed sleep logs every night of how long you have slept and how good the quality of your sleep was. It can also track your sleep over time and if you give it a log of your activities before sleeping, like having coffee, can compare what affects your sleep quality and how. Add to that 15 high quality alarm tones (you can use your own too) and it translates into a great value app that you just have to try out.

You can find Sleep Cycle on iOS and on Android.

Pulling out all the stops!

This should be your go-to app if you take your sleep really, really seriously (as you should). This is the mother of all sleep assist apps.

Sleep Genius

The sleep genius app was made after years of research by experts on neuroscience, sound and, of course, sleep! They claim to have helped NASA with helping astronauts sleep during the research. Hey, if it is good enough for NASA, it has to be good enough for you, right? The app is chock full of all the functionality that you might want at your fingertips and then some.

The app has sleep programs that you can follow that trains your brain towards a regular, healthy sleeping pattern. The base version of the app comes with one sleep pattern. You can unlock 3 more plus other additional features through in app purchases. Apart from the very helpful directed sleep programs. The app does almost everything that any other sleep assist app can. It tracks your body’s sleep and movements through the night to detect the sleep stage and depending upon the stage you are in wakes you up gently by playing specific soothing sounds. It tracks sleep statistics like duration, quality, efficiency and many, many others through an easy to access dashboard. The stats are recorded per night and over time as well.

They claim that their Neuro-sensory algorithm with help prepare your brain for sleep, guide it through every sleep stage and wake you up gently with a smart alarm.

You can find Sleep Genius on iOS and on Android.

Now if only it could make you breakfast in bed as well, that would be a dream come true.

About the Author:

 

Eugene Gabriel is a passionate blogger. He has always been fascinated by sleep and how it relates to health and wellness. Read his post on Ways to get Better Sleep. You can follow him on twitter @eugenegabrielj.