Do you have trouble going to sleep at night? Do you toss and turn for an hour thinking about what you have to do the next day? Counting sheep not working? Check out these two apps I recommend using on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, for a good nights rest.

For an optimal functioning mind, body and spirit, General health practitioners recommend to get at least seven hours of sleep per night. If your like me, thats a lot to ask for when you have so much going on in your life. Even though you think you don’t have time to sleep, you must make time. Having your seven to eight hours of sleep will help you become more productive, healthier and in a better mood to tackle everyday problems. So ill show you what I did to change my ways and have a better day, just by using two apps I downloaded from Apple’s app store.

Before I tell you what these apps are, you should first set your self a time to go to bed every night. If you want to go to sleep at 10:00pm, you should have everything you need to get done before 9:00PM. That means cleaning, showering, brushing your teeth, taking out the trash, etc. So that by 9:00PM your in your bed not worrying about what you didn’t do. Now what?

Now that your in bed you might want to play a game or browse the web on your smartphone, if you want to sleep that’s a bad idea. Its easy to kill valuable sleeping hours by doing those activities while in bed. Instead download an app called SleepUp! (100% Deep Sleep).

SleepUp!

This amazing application is available through Apple's App Store. Before I found this easy to use little app, I had downloaded many others promising I would be able to sleep with their “noise machines”. I was tired of having sleeping aid apps play the same music, rain, river, chimes, over and over in a loop without putting me to sleep. Every one is different so those apps might work for you, but not for me. SleepUp! has only one sound track, the only options you can change is the length of time you want the sound to play, 10, 15, or 20 minutes.

The simple play button is what makes this app so great. You just hit play and you start to hear waves crashing on a beach, over the waves are frequency sound waves. At first I thought the mixture of the two sounds were a bit weird, but that mixture of sounds make me fall asleep every time. The app is a little pricey at $1.99, but is well worth it in my opinion.


Sleep Cycle alarm clock

Another great app I love to use is Sleep Cycle alarm clock. This application is an alarm clock that analyzes your sleep patterns and wakes you in the lightest sleep phase. That means its supposed to wake you in a more natural way where you feel rested and relaxed. “since you move differently in bed during the different phases, the Sleep Cycle alarm clock is able to use the accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor your movement and determine which sleep phase you are in. Sleep Cycle then uses a 30 minute alarm window that ends at your set alarm time and wakes you in your lightest sleep phase.”

I have used this app for the past 6 months and it also works very well for me. The app keeps track of how many hours I sleep every day. I can go back and view the amount of hours I have slept In past days, whats my average amount of sleeping hours and also see how much I move through out the night. In the mornings when it wakes me up, I feel great.

All you do is place your iPhone or iPod on the corner of the bed with the app running and it will monitor your every move. In the morning when it senses the slightest move within the 30 minute window, Sleep Cycle will wake you up.

The only down side I have found with Sleep Cycle, is that you have to have the app running all night. You can’t turn on Sleep Cycle and press the home button to have it running in the background. This issue is not really that big off a deal, since you're going to bed. Just make sure your phone is connected to the charger when you set the app, so that your mobile phone won’t die in the middle of the night.

Sleep Cycle costs $0.99 and is a great price for all the features it has to offer.


I have used both of these wonderful Applications at the same time with much success. SleepUp! allows me to go straight to sleep while at the same time using Sleep Cycle as a “smart” alarm clock, by monitoring my sleep and waking me up at the best time possible.

**If you want to try and use both applications at the same time, like I do. You will first have to run SleepUp! and set the settings to how long you want it to play the music, Then press the home button on your phone to run the app in the background. After that open Sleep Cycle and set the time you want to wake up in the morning and leave it running, just flip the phone over on to your bed. You should now have both apps running at the same time. Enjoy the sounds and fall asleep.

Since these two apps have helped me out so much, I figured I would try and help other people having trouble falling asleep. But since everyone is a little different, these apps might not even help you with your sleep. So let us know your experience with these apps. Have you used the apps mentioned above? Do they help? Do you use other apps to help you go to sleep? What do you recommend doing before going to bed in order to get some proper shut eye? Leave your comments down bellow.

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