What is Sleep Calculator?
Sleep Calculator is an Online tool of which I was only recently made aware of by my Flatmate Alex Castellon, after discussing my trouble getting a good night’s rest with him. May I say since I discovered Sleep Calculator I have considered it a god-sent revelation – yes, I genuinely rendered Alex to be a god. My seemingly ineffective sleeping pattern had been cured!
What does it do and how does it work?
What Sleep Calculator does is it gives you a certain amount of time you can or should sleep, based on a concept known as “Sleep cycles”. It has two functions: “When should I wake up” and “When should I go to bed”, the former primarily used for when you’re tired and you want to know which time you will you wake up the most refreshed, and the latter primarily used for people who want to know when to go to bed so that they can wake up refreshed at a time which fits their schedule.
Whichever function you decide you want to use, you will notice that the times provided for you to go to sleep or wake up differ at ninety minute intervals. This is the approximate time each sleep cycle lasts, and at the end of each sleep cycle is supposed to be when a person is in their ‘lightest’ stage of sleep, meaning that it is far less draining to get up out of your pit! The website also suggests that the optimal amount of sleep cycles you should grant yourself is 5-6. You also get the option of listening to white noise played at 3 different tones to help aid sleep, labelled “white”, “pink” and “brown”. It also has a button called “Sleep stages” which redirects you to a Wikipedia page on sleep, but I would advise taking information from Wikipedia with a pinch of salt as it is not a very reliable source of information.
Interrupting the cycles of sleep can have negative effects on your mood and health. Your ability to process and retain information can be significantly reduced by just one night of interrupted sleep and your emotional intelligence is also reduced which can result in you becoming irrational. Some of the physical health detriments include Increased risk of heart disease, impair ability to maintain and ideal weight, accelerate tumour growth and raising blood pressure. [Mercola, 2014] This alone is a perfect example of how helpful Sleep Calculator can be.
Benefits and Drawbacks
From personal experience, I can say for definite that Sleep Calculator is an excellent tool, because whenever I have planned me sleep schedule in accordance to the guidelines it provided, I always woke up the next morning feeling particularly refreshed, even more so than on nights in which I slept for a longer period! This is especially important to students and employees of course as being on peak alertness is of utmost importance. It’s not all good news however – the website has some drawbacks. It doesn’t provide an online alarm clock, so you are expected to either have your own or find one elsewhere online. It also states that “It takes the average human 15 minutes to fall asleep” which of course is not going to be the case for everyone, because everyone is different, so it leaves it down to you to estimate how long it should take you to fall asleep, and if you’re anything like me – a man with a fluctuating sleeping pattern, then you will have little to no idea of how long that will be.
Conclusion
Overall this is an exceptionally useful online tool, as its advantages have provided me with life changing benefits to both my academic ability and overall mental and physical health, which I think greatly outweigh the trivial drawbacks of the website which half can be rectified with a simple google search in a different tab.