Sleep calculators
If you’re among the 55 per cent of Australians who say they aren’t satisfied with their sleep, the thought of being able to enlist a device to help turn things around sounds understandably appealing.Recently, people have been turning to ‘sleep calculators’ for exactly that reason, but the jury remains out on both their effectiveness and the theory behind their design.
How do sleep calculators work?
Essentially, you punch the time you want to wake up into the calculator and it provides a selection of suitable bedtimes, for that night.But it’s a lot more complicated than simply counting back seven or eight hours from your preferred wake-up time. In calculating a few different ideal bedtimes for you, sleep calculators account for the fact that we all have around five or six sleep cycles a night, and that there are better times – or sleep stages – than others to wake up in during a sleep cycle if you want to feel as refreshed as possible in the morning.
For example, if you want to wake up at 7am, according to a sleep calculator the best times to hit the sack are either 9.45pm, 11.15pm or 12.45am – depending on how many hours sleep usually leaves you feeling refreshed.
The theory is that by going to bed at one of those times, when your alarm goes off at 7am you’ll be in the rapid eye movement, or REM stage of sleep. And people often feel most refreshed when they wake up from REM sleep compared to waking up during another sleep stage.