We spend a third of our lives sleeping, or at least that’s what we should be doing. It’s too easy to get into bad habits — enjoying screen time right up until you go to sleep or reading a book instead of turning out the light.
While some willpower is still required, we’ve rounded up 10 apps that are guaranteed to help you develop some healthier habits. Whether it’s through tracking your sleep or waking you up at the optimal moment, they’re useful tools in your quest for a good night’s sleep.
1. Sleep Cycle (Free)
One of the runaway success stories of the App Store over the years, Sleep Cycle is an essential tool in your bid to sleep. It analyzes your sleep before waking you up in the lightest sleep phase, and ensuring you’re well rested and relaxed. It’ll even track when you snore, too.
2. Sleep Better (Free)
Sleep Better tracks everything about your day to day life. It tracks your sleep duration, cycle and efficiency, but it also combines that with what you’re doing during waking hours. You can use it to enter daily habits such as alcohol or caffeine consumption, before figuring out where the connections are. You can learn a lot about what works best for you.
3. Calm (Free)
Calm is an app focused on mindfulness and meditation — both of which will help you sleep better. It offers guided meditation sessions available in varying lengths, covering topics such as calming anxiety, deep sleep and even working on non-judgement and forgiveness. It’s a great all rounder for those trying to reach inner peace.
Ambient sounds to help you sleep are a divisive topic. They won’t work for everyone, but for those that appreciate it, Sleep Pillow Sounds is a great solution. The app offers over 300,000 combinations of sound mixes, catering for all tastes, and allowing you to get into a relaxed headspace before you sleep.
To bed isn’t the most stylish of apps any more, but it is incredibly useful. Give it your age and your wakeup time, and the app reminds you of when you should start preparing for bed. Think of it as like your parents when you were a kid, giving you a nudge when you should really be making a move. It’s simple to use.
The CARROT range of apps are great at getting angry at you and motivating you to get stuff done. In the case of CARROT Alarm, it’s a simple alarm clock that happens to get pretty sarcastic and mad when you don’t move. It’s a fun and lighthearted way of getting you going in the morning, plus there’s a regular stream of new content to unlock.
Wake Alarm Clock is an attractive and intuitive alarm clock. A slap or flip of your phone causes it to go into snooze mode, while shaking is the only thing that will stop it playing. It’s a simple yet effective method in ensuring you have to be a bit more active than just hitting a button, and should help deep sleepers.
Digipill is a form of meditation app, providing you with meditations that are known as pills. Using a mixture of psychoacoustics and NLP, it helps you change your mood and perception, gradually improving things, and helping you feel calmer as well as sleep better. It’s worth trying for those looking for a more holistic approach to better sleep.
How well you sleep can depend heavily on how you spent your day. Sleep tracker+, otherwise known as Lumen Trails, lets you take notes throughout your day, from what you ate to what exercise you did. In coordination with how you slept, you can then see what connections exist and work on improving your life overall, not just your sleeping time.
Working via your Apple Watch, AutoSleep automatically tracks your sleep at all times. A Today Widget pinpoints how well you slept, as well as how you’ve been doing in recent days. You can also track the time it takes you to fall asleep, and analyze the process. Even if you don’t wear your Apple Watch to bed, AutoSleep tracks your bed time by when you take your Watch off to go to bed.-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
