The Femme Files

Fine tune your sleep

This week, I have discovered the most amazing app!

It’s called the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock and it analyses your sleep patterns and only wakes you up in your lightest sleep phase – apparently making you more inclined to wake up feeling well rested and relaxed, not tired, wired or half asleep. Now why am I harping on about sleep this week?  

Ask any health professional about the number one health complaint they receive today and I bet its tiredness and general lack of sleep. Now if you think the worst a bad night’s sleep can do is make you irritable, impatient and lack proper judgment, read on. Bad sleeping patterns affect your hormones, affecting your ability to eat wholesome foods and causing a little chemical warfare in your body.

When you repeatedly (or have even one) bad night sleep you tell the hormones in your body to store fat rather than burn it.  Leptin, our body’s saviour when it comes to telling us to ‘put the Tim Tam down and walk away’ is unable to function as effectively when you haven’t had a proper shut eye. Ghrelin, on the other hand appears to increase when you fail to achieve the needed sleep for your body. Ghrelin being the delightful hormone that tells us to ‘eat now’ or else!  This is why it is also so easy to make poor food choices when you are so dam tired. 

And what about managing those stress levels? The latest survey conducted by the suicide prevention group ‘RUOK?’ found that 40% of Australian workers reported feeling medium to high stress levels in their job on a DAILY basis. Given that we are more stressed out than ever before, why wouldn’t you try to control one of the only forms of stress you can? (I mean you can’t really tell your boss where to take the annual report). Under stress, your body can release more cortisol, stuffing around with your ability to digest food and making you even better at storing not burning your fat.   

What ensues is a vicious cycle of being what I like to refer to as ‘tired but wired’. The high cortisol levels in your body eating away at your B Vitamins that give you energy and also tell your body you need to sleep. Consistently being tired means you turn to fuel like caffeine and sugar for a pick me up that just doesn’t seem to last and leads to more sugar crashes and more urges for the next sugary food source.

So now you’ve made poor food choices, you think, “Well, I’ll just do an extra ½ hour on the treadmill post work or prior to work”. Problem here is that this scenario only adds more time to your sleep debt. And you wonder why your still tired and fuelling your body with more crap?

And here is where my little app ‘Sleep Cycle’ comes into play.

According to Maciek Drejak, the app programmer for Sleep Cycle, your body goes through cycles of light sleep to deep sleep to REM-sleep (the dream state). Now, your regular alarm clock disregards these cycles and goes off at some ungodly hour, regardless of where your body is within its given cycle. What Sleep Cycle does, is use the accelerometer in your phone (whatever that is…it works) to monitor your movement and establish which sleep phase you are in. Once established, you set the alarms 30 minute ideal window of opportunity to wake you up and it will go out of its way to ensure it is calling you to arise from your slumber in your lightest sleep phase. No more waking up feeling like a truck has hit you!

So girls, is anyone a regular user of Sleep Cycle? Got any other tried and tested sleep remedies? I would love to know…..