Review: Sleep Cycle App

I’ve been using the Sleep Cycle app for over a month now, and it’s the best dollar I’ve spent in my entire life. It’s beautiful to look at. It’s easy to work with. But most of all, it works – and it does some pretty cool stuff.

It uses the iPhone’s accelerometer (Accelerometer? Gyroscope? Those magic beans that know how you’re moving the phone through space. Those.) to turn your phone into a monitor of how deep you sleep. Less movement, deeper sleep. At first, I thought it was a joke. People pay lots of money for sleep monitoring devices; how will this little app on my phone really pick up on anything significant? But I gave it the two nights’ acclimation period, and I’m totally sold. It matches up completely with times where I do notice myself waking up, it tracks deeper sleep on nights when I’m really exhausted (hello, Warrior Dash) and it logs how long I sleep.

All of that is interesting, and the graphs are pretty, but its really practical use is the alarm function. It tracks your sleep pattern in order to wake you when you’re most awake within a 30-minute window up until your alarm time. No more getting shocked out of a deep sleep and being all groggy. It’s wonderful.

I’m sleeping deeper and longer, and I’m waking up faster and more clearheaded. I love it.