Sleep hacking

Waging war with sleep is very tiring business and I've been doing it pretty much as long as I can remember. My daily 750words are littered with battle reports, my twitter stream gets constantly barraged with updates from the war effort and I think it's pretty safe to say that I may have tried more different things than most people to stave off the foe.

Some things I've tried so far:

• drinking tea like it was water
• eating caffeine pills before going to bed
• drinking energy drinks by the gallon
• phone alarms
• computer alarms that force me to get out of bed to turn them off
• cluster alarms - even five in 20 minute intervals
• meditation (polyphasic sleep of sorts?)
• going to bed early

Nothing works.

No matter how hard I try to sync my circadian rhythms with something even remotely appropriate by society's standards I will eventually always slip back into my habit of going to bed at 3am and waking up at 9am at the earliest.

Sometimes it drifts even farther and it becomes practically impossible to wake up before 11am ... and no, going to bed early doesn't help; I just don't fall asleep and why waste the time just lying in bed like that?

But! I think I may finally have found a solution - an iPhone app that's a bit smart about handling sleep.

Sleep Cycle

Sleep Cycle is the best alarm clock I have ever used. Not only do I get to snuggle with my iphone when I'm sleeping, it also tracks my movements over night to figure out when is the best time to give waking me up a shot.

Plus there are statistics of how I'm sleeping. Scoar!

And it actually works even for heavy sleeprs living in their own timezone like myself. Even going to bed at 5am and trying to be up by 6am works. Ever tried waking up after an hour of sleep? It's practically impossible.

Some might think it a bit strange to sleep with an iphone in their bed, but I've been doing that forever anyway - otherwise there's no chance of hearing the alarm.

But not all is perfect.

What often ends up happening is that I will wake up when the alarm sounds (it's a veyr polite alarm too, all it takes to snooze is smacking it a bit), then be unable to crawl out of bed and eventually I just fall back asleep for another hour or two.

But I'm sure I'll figure that one out eventually ... trying really really hard to actually go to bed at sensible hours might work. Of course there is a website for that called sleepyti.me.

That is, _if _I can get myself to even fall asleep before 2am.