You might have heard that one must get eight hours of sleep. But do we get those hours?
Ask yourself and come up with an honest answer if it’s yes, bravo! But if you don’t, you are at the right place.
The quality of sleep matters, and the world of chaos we live in doesn’t exactly help us catch the much-needed z’s.
If you are worried about your sleep and want to improve it, some apps can help you do just that.
The best sleep tracker apps use sound, bedtime, wake time, or heart rate to give you an accurate picture of your night.
Some apps also use data from wearable devices such as an Apple Watch or FitBit to provide you with a sleep score and show graphs that show your sleep patterns.
I have carefully sorted out 7 apps to record sleep so that you live a healthy life.
Apps to record sleep
When you get a good night’s sleep, its benefits are endless, yet people are ignoring it, knowingly or unknowingly.
The following apps will happily send you off to your dreamland, only if you honestly track your sleep. But before we get to them, here are a few things you should know about sleep.
The basics of sleep
Following are some parameters that define what sleep does to you.
How much sleep do you need?
- Newborns: between 14 and 17 hours a day.
- Babies: between 12 and 16 hours a day.
- Toddlers: need to sleep between 11 and 14 hours a day.
- Preschoolers: between 10 and 13 hours a day.
- School-going children: 9 to 12 hours of sleep each night.
- Teenagers: between 8 to 10 hours of sleep each night.
- Adults: at least 7 or more hours of good-quality sleep.
Benefits of getting more sleep
WebMD suggests numerous benefits of getting a good night’s sleep. I have listed a few of them:
- A full sleep boosts your mood.
- Sleep keeps your brain sharper.
- It makes you strive for better performance.
- When you are sound asleep, your blood pressure goes down, which gives your heart and blood vessels a bit of a rest.
- More regular blood sugar.
- It fights germs as your body tries to recover.
- Better weight management as well-rested is equal to being less hungry.
Too much sleep?
Remember that 7-8 hours of sleep is the gold standard. Anything above that – say more than 9 hours of sleep might do more harm than good.
Research claims that people who sleep longer have more calcium buildup in their heart arteries and less flexible leg arteries.
1. BetterSleep: Relax and Sleep
BetterSleep: Relax and Sleep is an app used by over 35 million users that are created to get rid of your insomnia and get a whole night’s sleep.
The app lets you select some relaxing sounds with a hint of nature amalgamated with a mellifluous melody.
This is the sleep-inducing melody you need!
If you are looking for mindfulness meditations, they too are included in the mix to help you catch sound sleep.
The app also lets you access relaxed melodies shared by the BetterSleep community.
And did I mention that the app also lets you add your favorite songs from your music library into the mix, making for a soothing experience?
If you encounter trouble sleeping, look no further than this app.
2. Pzizz – Sleep, Nap, Focus
Pzizz is a great app to improve your sleeping and napping abilities.
The app claims to help you “fall asleep fast, stay asleep, and wake up feeling refreshed.”
It uses the science of psychoacoustic – a branch of psychology that explores sound perception and its physiological effects. The app is confident that with its thorough examining clinical studies, they have created sound sequences and dynamic dreamscapes that are tailor-made for each portion of the sleep cycle.
The amalgamation of music, sound effects, and soothing voiceover quietens your mind and puts you to sleep for the exact amount of time to feel revived the following day.
There’s a premium membership that explores more, but Pzizz allows you to take their 7-day sleep challenge before opting for it.
3. Relax And Sleep Well Hypnosis
Relax And Sleep Well Hypnosis may not be for everyone.
But it is a known fact that hypnosis has been used to treat various underlying problems such as smoking, alcoholism, pain, etc.
Many people have used self-hypnosis to treat their sleeping problems or even insomnia.
This app aims just to do that. Many people think hypnosis is a strange phenomenon, but it does help you get into a deep state of relaxation.
Relax And Sleep Well Hypnosis guides you through the entire process, combining voice-like hypnosis and relaxing sounds that will lull you to sleep.
This quirky app needs your attention if you’re not getting enough sleep.
4. Sleep Cycle – Sleep Tracker
Sleep Cycle AB’s Sleep Cycle app is an excellent app for analyzing your sleep.
It does so with the help of simple sleep patterns by diagnosing audio recordings of talking, snoring, coughing, and other sounds humans make during sleep.
You can track your sleep cycle graphically. Along with overlays audio recordings that will help you identify what goes on when you are sleeping.
The app is adept at identifying both short and long-term trends. And don’t worry, you don’t need any equipment out fitness variables to track everything I’ve just mentioned in this paragraph.
All you need to do is keep your phone by your bedside As it uses sound analysis to identify sleep states.
The downside of this app is that it must be turned on before going to bed, and it won’t work if you keep your phone in another room.
Another flaw is that you need to manually turn on and turn off the sleep timer, which could get problematic if you forget to do this regularly.
If you can’t keep up, this is the app to track how you drift off in your dreamland.
5. Digipill: Guided Meditation
You might have noticed that the term meditation often comes around when we talk about sleep.
Because medication calms down your mind, it makes you more relaxed, and when you get more flexible, you’re capable of a good night’s sleep compared to a chaotic mind.
Digipill: Guided Meditation will help you reduce stress, lose weight, beat insomnia, and even increase motivation.
All this will make you relaxed with the power of this digital pill.
Treat this app as a panacea to all human problems we face daily.
The app is a cultivated mix of language and sound that engages the active mind, changes your thinking, and encourages well-being.
You have to choose an audio pill based on what you need to do. Lay back with earphones and close your eyes.
The good thing is that the first pill in your cabinet is free, but if you need extra pills you have to purchase it in the pharmacy in the app itself or buy unlimited access to all the pills with a subscription.
Each pill will get you around 30 minutes. And has unique names that will help you identify what you need to focus on right now. For example, ‘Sleep Deeply’ will give you a night of rest, “Power Nap” for refreshing snow, etc.
When you use the app, you’ll feel like it was tailor-made for you.
6. Pillow: Sleep Cycle Tracker
An acronym for a sleep tracking application, Pillow Sleep Cycle Tracker, is an advanced sleep-tracking alarm clock whose core function is analyzing your slumber.
I absolutely love its clean and inspired design, along with its intuitive gesture-based user interface; it makes you want to use the app more often. And you will!
Pillow has a cutting-edge algorithm that uses motion and sound patterns to detect a complete picture of your sleep. All of this data comes from the most recent research related to sleep.
When you complete the sleep, you’ll find a comprehensive sleep stage diagram that shows you the times you are awake and REM (Rapid Eye Movement), light, and asleep phases of sleep. The sleep statistics are on point.
Although this is iOS-only, the app takes advantage of the ecosystem by fully integrating with Apple Health, which will extend sleep tracking further.
The app also measures how “your” statistics affect sleep quality, weight, blood pressure, heart rate, calories, caffeine, and alcohol consumption.
7. PrimeNap: Free Sleep Tracker
PrimeNap: Free Sleep Tracker is an Android-only app that efficiently tracks sleep and all the related metrics.
When it tracks your sleep, it provides valuable data and charts that analyze your sleep quality and length.
Like other apps, PrimeNap also records your sleep based on movements and can be used to track mid-day naps as well as nighttime.
Its unique features, such as a dream journal, relaxing sleep sounds to play while you rest, and intelligent alarms, separate its app from others.
The app includes features you’ll find in more expensive apps, which I like since this is a free app.
What’s more perfect is that it can be used without any connection and in airplane mode.
If you are want to export your sleep data and share it with others, you can do so as PrimeNap lets you download your sleep session in various formats.
You can improve your sleeping patterns by analyzing what the app has tracked so far in terms of your sleep pattern to identify where the problems lie.
What else you can do:
Listening to soothing music is helpful for people who can’t sleep. There are hundreds of YouTube videos that include mellifluous audio that can put you to sleep.
White noise, calming playlists on Spotify or Apple Music, etc., are also a good start.
But if you often have trouble sleeping and feel fatigued after sleeping, you should talk with your doctor.
Conclusion
These are sleep apps to record sleep.
When the sleep cycle gets messy, our lives go haywire. Take charge of your life and get proper sleep for at least seven hours, no matter what job you do.
They are well-equipped to handle your multitude of sleeping patterns displayed in detailed charts.
Some of the apps can also be used on a wearable fitness device, so if you are into that, then do take advantage of it.
If you want to track your sleep and improve your sleeping pattern, these apps will help you develop a plan.
Remember that these apps, no matter how modern they are, are limited in how much sleep support they offer. Everything depends on your willingness to catch your z’s.
It’s essential that you get not only at least seven hours of sleep but also good-quality sleep regularly, so you feel relaxed when you wake up.
