The ABC of Better Sleep

Recently I’ve been having a lot of trouble with chronic fatigue and have been in search of self help while awaiting investigations into why I’m so sleepy at the moment, I’ve found an excellent semi-hypnosis app for the iPhone. It’s called the ABC of Better Sleep, here’s the website.

The app isn’t free and it’s not a rip off either, it’s certainly worth the investment and I’ve found it very useful in driffting off faster and thus getting more from the sleep I do get. It’s hypnotherapy and thus some people may not be comfortable with that but it’s useful in pre-sleep. There are a series of information pages on what to do and what to avoid to help your body prepare for better sleep. For example I didn’t know that bannanas contain similar sleep inducing properties that milk has. The actual programme is delivered as a 28 minute audio file that you follow repeating each night and it’s really very relaxing. I may find a way to record the sleep sequence to MP3 so I can play it on another player while the iPod monitors my movements for the sleep cycle graph.

Sleep is important for creative people, and provides a good time to rest a seemingly restless mind, so sleep is very important in my line of work. I must stress though, if you’re having as much trouble as I am with tiredness, seek medical advice, lack of sleep or a bad quality of sleep can be highly debilitating and is a serious matter that should always be discussed with doctors.

Creating The Right Mood
I’ve put a lot of focus on improving my sleep hygiene, including going decaff and have even moved my bedroom into a smaller, darker, quieter room that’s easier to balance the temperature in. Aromatheraphy is also a good thing to bear in mind, technology can help here too with those plugin air freshners, I’d recommend one that cycles round three different containers as you tend to notice them more. Lavendar and Lemon are always good choices. A timer can be put between the wall socket and the air freshner so that the room isn’t overloaded and it also lasts longer as it’s only switched on ideally just before bed and then turns off when you’re asleep.

LED lighting is also amazingly great to bring soothing colours into my night time pre sleep warm down. Believe it or not, replacing one 45 watt lightbulb with a fridge light bulb, yes a 15W incandesant bulb, can really help phase down the amount of light going in to your eyes as you prepare for sleep. As my room is so dark I’ve got another timer on a bright lamp which will turn on just before my alarm goes off. In other words I’m commander and master over my sleeping environment and it’s working really well.

Other Recommended iPhone Apps for Sleep
I’ve metioned the excellent Sleep Cycle App in a previous post but it really is helping me see how disturbed my night movements can be, but there are other applications which can help in the winding down before actually falling asleep, mostly these are white noise applications. White noise is very effective I find in diverting my attention and keeping my mind blank, music often does this for me too and I tend to choose soothing songs to fall asleep to, but it’s always handy to have a rainforest, ocean or thunderstorm to command at will.

Rain has always been a relaxing sound for me, there’s nothing better than being tucked up in the warm hearing the rain tapping at the window, or even caught in a stationary car in a heavy rainstorm, it’s just so relaxing. What these white noise apps do though quite often is allow you to add binaural beats, which are supposed to slow down your brain waves to a more sleep like rythm, but I tend to turn those options off and just have the white noise, like rain.

1. Bloom
2. Binaural Beats
3. Custom Sounds of Nature Lite
4. Sleep Tracker
5. Orba (a beautiful soothing game)

Sleep Tracker allows you to chart the amount of hours sleep you had to what your mood was the following day. Bloom is a longstanding music creation app that creates such a soothing and always evolving synth soundscape. Custom Sounds of Nature allows you to select a white noise scene like an ocean and add and change the volume of backgrounding sounds like seaguls and the strength of the waves. Orba is actually a colour ball matching game that is just so beautifully designed, playing it empties the mind of thoughts.

My fave though has to be Binaural Beats, simply because even without the hemisync noise you can create and vary the elements in a sound scene, so you can create a loud heavy thunderstorm or a light rain shower next to a stream. So there we have it, if falling asleep is an art rather than an exact science there’s something out there for everyone that technology can help us achive, from sensory rooms, hypnosis and white noise to relaxing games.

Posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010

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1. A Week Of Enlightenment | Lee Jordan - Midlands Web Developer says:

   November 23, 2010 at 00:09

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