Duvet rolled into caterpillar shape makes for good sleeping! Definitely more so than mobile phones. Believe me: Unlike Kana-chan here, I have tried both.
Rather than meditate for hours, how about using the amazing power of the smartphone to improve sleep quality with less quantity? That is the idea behind applications like the successful SleepCycle app for iPhone. You put it somewhere in the same bed as yourself, and it maps your movements through the night and uploads them to the Internet… no, wait, it uses them to calculate your sleep cycles.
All humans have sleep cycles, evidently. They are not bikes, but structures of our sleep. They last from 90 minutes up to 110 minutes, most commonly the first from what literature tells me. In each such cycle we descend toward deep, slow-wave sleep, and gradually back up toward REM sleep, which is similar to being awake but with intense emotions. At the end of this dreaming, we may wake up for just a moment (but will generally not remember it later) and then sink toward the next deep sleep. If we don’t fall asleep at that point, for instance because we have already slept for 9 hours, we will generally feel pretty good and ready to take on the day. The SleepCycle app tries to wake you up at just such a point, but a cycle or two earlier than you would have woken up naturally. It should still be better than trying to claw your way up from deep sleep.
This is most important to young people, who continue to sink down into delta sleep, the deep silence of the brain, almost every sleep cycle of the night. As we grow older, we tend to only have that deep sleep in the first half of the night. Â Now that I am past 50, that seems to be the case with me. (Although if you skip sleep a couple days, you will try to regain that particular type of sleep.) The elderly may have only minutes of deep sleep, some nights none at all. But enough about that.
I don’t have an iPhone, but I do have an Android smartphone. So I downloaded a very similar app, “Sleep as an Droid”. I even tested the sensor, that it was able to register the movements when I tossed or turned on my bed. But even though I tried to use it tonight, the alarm only went off at the last moment, and there were no statistics. I must have somehow gotten the setup wrong, I guess. It is a bit more complex than a common alarm. So I may try again.
On the bright side, it did not catch fire. It is generally a bad idea to cover your smartphone with highly insulating textiles for many hours on end. I tried to place it so that it was not covered, and did succeed, but still I guess it made me a little nervous: I woke up twice during the first few hours of the night. This may have turned to my advantage: I used the opportunity to restart the 2Hz delta brainwave entrainment track on my computer, getting extra doses of deep slow-wave sleep. I certainly was less sleepy than usual at work today, but it was hardly intentional on the part of the sleep app, so to speak.
Also, the phone was not warm at all in the morning, so perhaps I should give it another chance. I’m not putting it under my pillow though!
Now this is going to bug me.
How would it work with Jeff on his side of the bed and me on mine? What, exactly, is it picking up, and how?
I would love to know my sleep cycles and be awakened at an optimal time, but even if it did work perfectly I would still be bothered by not knowing how.
It sucks that my brain seems to have entered “old age” way back in my thirties. I remember when I was once intelligent. Ah, the good old days . . .
Wisdom is better than intelligence anyway. ^_^
As to how the software works, it uses the movement sensor in the smartphone, the same that changes the picture if you turn the screen over sideways. It is actually much more sensitive than that, so it will notice the movement of your mattress when you turn over.
If you share a mattress with someone, their movements will be picked up too, and chaos ensues, unless you have somehow mastered the skill of synchro-sleeping.
No synchro-sleeping (yet), but another problem perhaps: we have a Tempur-Pedic bed, and no matter how we toss and turn, we can scarcely disturb the others, even if we try! I suppose it would still be picked up by motion detector, but if it is relying on “seismic” activity, it ain’t getting any!
You should definitely try before you buy. And don’t put the phone under the pillow where it may overheat. Some people swear by it, but I do not. The only benefit I had from the two nights I used such a program, was waking up a couple times extra. That would have been a malefit rather than a benefit, if I did not have delta brainwave entrainment to play at those times.
“Other”, not “others”. Our bed is strictly a two-person area! Even when we’ve tried to let the kids sleep with us, for one reason or another, it has not been terrifically successful. We’re all “floppers”, especially Jenna, and a queen-sized bed is simply not adequate room for more than two, no matter whether that “others” statement was taken in a racy way or not!
I am sure nobody here suspects you of anything more perverse than serial monogamy, and little enough of that. Your kids must be way too big to worm into your bed by now anyway. Soon they will need their own double beds! Eep!