What requires no shopping, cooking, driving, or special gear…is free if you can find it and widely agreed to be super good for you…yet is wicked difficult to get, a little personal to talk about and more than a little fleeting?
Um, yes, maybe that (you thought it not me)... political accord too perhaps (sigh), financial savvy I suppose, free cable aussi… but I was thinking good sleep. Yes, good old-fashioned shuteye, zzzz’s, log sawing, snoozing… that critical third bit of the wellness troika.
It’s weird because everyone sort of knows good sleep’s important, and there’s no shortage of info out there on how to come by it. But most of us, me included, don’t focus on it much, certainly not like we do fitness or eating.
So it was with mild surprise that I got totally drawn in to a great article on hacking sleep from Precision Nutrition. And soon thereafter found myself actually thinking about my nightly routine and (gasp) trying to improve it with Sleep Cycle, a sleep/alarm app on the iPhone that tells you how well you’re snoozing.
Highly recommend the article for it’s simple-to-try prescriptions. And, while I’m still pretty early on with the app, very cool to quickly see what kind of sleep I’m getting (lots of room for improvement it appears). In particular, I dig the feature which picks when’s the best time to gently wake you up (within a 30 minute window you set) based on how you’re sleeping. Definitely feels like I’m emerging from slumber in a much crisper state than with the old DefCon 4, sonic boom approach.
If better sleep's on your improvement list... give these a look. And if you’ve got any tried/true sleep tips of your own, shout ‘em out.