You have likely experienced an early morning when you are in the middle of a dream—whether it’s good or bad—when wham! Your alarm goes off, and you feel like a bus hit you.
That’s been me my whole life because I am the furthest thing from a morning person, which made me wonder: Would using a sleep calculator help me feel more rested?
It probably had something to do with the fact that I was working two jobs at the time—I went straight to work at a restaurant three nights a week when I left my day job with Runner’s World. On those nights, I often didn’t get home until after 9:30 p.m., easily making it a 14-hour day of work—not including the commute.
In order to be ready for the next day, I had to do several things: shower, pack my lunch, and organize what seems like a thousand other things before I am ready to get some shuteye. Hitting the seven to nine hour mark of recommended sleep? Forget about it. More times than not I wasn’t able to get to sleep until 11:30 p.m. or midnight.
hOmeLabs Alarm Clock more energy Best Alarm Clocks for Runners oomph to my workouts when I hit the gym, and more motivation to jump out of bed and attack the day when that alarm chimed. So I turned to Dr. Google, which suggested a sleep calculator. I found a website called sleepcalculator.com, but there are several other tools and calculators that work the same way online.
It seemed simple enough (and it was free), so I decided to give the sleep calculator a try for a month. The sleep calculator was an okay starting point, but the longer I used it, the more I wanted to figure out if I was really nailing the best way to maximize my Zzzs.
Setting Myself Up for Better Sleep
Let me explain the basics of the sleep calculator. First, it prompts you to enter in a time that you want to wake up, let’s say 7 a.m. It then gives you six “go to bed times” that would correlate to you waking up between full 90-minute sleep cycles as opposed to in the middle of a deep slumber.
According to Jordan Lewis, a postdoctoral sleep disorders researcher at Penn State College of Medicine whom I spoke to at the beginning of my experiment, a good night’s sleep for the average person consists of about five to six sleep cycles. (But keep that 90-minute cycle from the calculator in mind for later.)
Back to our example, if you want to wake up at 7 a.m., the sleep calculator instructs you to go to sleep at either 9:45 p.m. or 11:15 p.m.—taking into account that it takes the average person 15 minutes to fall asleep. It also suggests four other times after that, but you wouldn’t be getting the required amount of snooze time. The calculator also works the opposite way—there is a “if I go to sleep now” option that tells you when to wake up if you go to sleep within the next 15 minutes.
On paper, going to sleep and waking up at a certain time shouldn’t be too difficult. However, for me and for many, every single day is different, and sometimes going to bed at an exact time is simply out of the cards.
After about a week of using the calculator, I started to realize that the next month was going to be a little more difficult than I first anticipated.
I found myself rushing around when I finally got home from work so I could be in bed and ready to go to sleep at 10:45 p.m., which was the “best” sleep time for my ideal 6:30 a.m. wake up. And that stress to just get to bed didn’t help as I always try to wind down before going to sleep. Instead, many nights were spent wide-eyed under the covers and more anxious about trying to fall asleep than actually sleeping.
With my frustration growing each day, I wanted to know more.
The 4 Cycles of Good Sleep
including the TV in your room The Benefits of Foam Rolling, to get a better grasp on how sleep cycles work and to see if the sleep calculator was the best tool to fix my troubles.
He started by going over the four stages of sleep, broken up into two categories called non-REM and REM. (REM stands for “rapid eye movement.”) Within non-REM, there are three stages: Stage one is considered a very light sleep, where if you wake up you wouldn’t feel like you actually slept. This stage occurs when you first close your eyes and start to doze off.
Stage two is considered light sleep and is categorized by intermittent periods of muscle tension mixed with muscle relaxation. In stage three, you are finally in a deep sleep, and if you were awakened, you may feel disoriented for a few minutes. (We’ve all had that feeling at some point.) Oexman also let me know that most stages of deep sleep occur in the first half of the night and are typically absent for the last half of the night.
Finally, the fourth stage is known as REM sleep. It can be characterized by vivid dreams, so real your brain actually believes what happened in your dream is reality. The first cycle of REM usually occurs 90 minutes after you fall asleep and lasts about 10 minutes. However, throughout the night, each stage of REM can lengthen in time.
In fact, like Oexman said about deep sleep, all of the stages change in regards to their length—and they don't have to follow the same pattern for every sleep cycle. That actually makes the normal adult’s sleep cycle anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours.
Oexman then told me why the calculator wouldn’t be great for the long haul. The 90-minute schedule is its major flaw, and likely not fitting into my sleep pattern, as basically no one’s sleep cycles are consistently 90-minutes throughout the night.
In addition, sleep cycles don’t have to go in this perfect progression from stage one, to stage two, to stage three, and finally to REM. According to Oexman, you could wake up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and then fall right back into a deep sleep when you lay back down. It’s almost like your body has a brief pause mode when sleeping, so when you un-pause, it just picks up where you left off.
Also, it doesn’t really matter what stage of sleep you wake up in as the sleep calculator suggests. If you wake up during deep sleep or REM, the only negative effect would be feeling fatigued or disoriented. It is an immediate emotional response, but there is no physiological harm associated with waking up between stages in the long run.
A Regular Sleep Schedule is Key
The most beneficial practice someone can do to improve his or her sleep is to stick to a schedule, Dr. Oexman said. Your body will start to develop an internal clock and remember when it’s time to go to sleep and when it’s time to wake up.
After a month of being on a strict schedule, following sleep times suggested by the sleep calculator—going to bed around the same time each weeknight and waking up at either 6:30 or 7 a.m.—I noticed a positive difference in my overall energy levels throughout the day, which translated into an intense workout later on.
During week two of regulating my sleep, I noticed I didn’t feel so tired by the end of my workday, and I was more motivated to go to the gym to do my regular mix of strength training and cardio. My workouts felt easier overall, and there were a few days where I felt so great I opted to go way longer and harder than originally planned. I typically start with 15 minutes of cardio on the elliptical or the treadmill as a warmup, The 6 Best Walking Pads for Your Home Office strength training before stretching and calling it quits for the day. However, instead of just finishing up after my strength training, Nutrition - Weight Loss back on the treadmill to crank out additional miles.
[Runner’s World 10-Minute Cross-Training, gives you five muscle-building routines that take just 10 minutes to get you stronger.]
On the days I went to my second job, I started to notice I wasn’t counting down the minutes until I left as I usually find myself doing. And because I wasn’t tired, I was able to be more cheerful with customers.
But perhaps the area where I saw the most improvement was my ability to get my butt out of bed in the morning. I experienced more early mornings that month than I probably did the entire past year. As a college student, I was used to sleeping in as long as possible, and even scheduled my classes to accommodate my love for hitting the snooze button.
Some mornings I felt so great I forgot to make my coffee—something that never happens.
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Actual Sleep Tracking
Halfway through fixing my sleep behavior, I started wearing a Fitbit Alta to bed to see if I was truly sleeping better. Below is an example of a good and bad night’s sleep I experienced from this past month recorded by my Fitbit.
You can see the times I was awake or restless on the left was low, and mostly contained to when I was falling asleep and waking up. Compare that to a bad night’s sleep where I experienced a lot of restfulness in the first half of the night—which is where most of the average person’s deep sleep is supposed to occur. While I technically got more Zzzs (total sleep), something in my routine kept me from settling down.
Getting the right amount of sufficient sleep is a crucial part of someone’s overall health, and is especially important for an athlete, Oexman told me.
For example, a bunch of interrupted or restricted sleep can increase levels of the stress hormone cortisol (bumping up your heart rate), mess with the hormones that control your appetite, and even mess with how well your body recovers after a hard workout. (For more, check out Marco Poggioli / EyeEm.)
Going Beyond a Good Sleep Schedule
The Best Fitness Trackers for Runners wearable sleep trackers because they monitor your movement while you slumber. While they are not very effective at tracking your exact stages of sleep, they can help to wake you at an optimal time by looking for any sign of movement indicating that you’re in a light sleep.
“[You are] technically already awake so it just reminds you it is time to wake up,” he says.
While everyone’s sleep habits will be different, I also learned some efficient ways everyone can wind down at night. My version used to consist of looking at my phone or reading a book, but I learned I’ve been winding down wrong as well. That’s because the light from our devices has a higher concentration of blue light instead of natural light—and blue light is known to negatively affect the melatonin levels (hormones that help maintain your body’s circadian rhythm) more than any other wavelength.
Turning off all technology 30 minutes before going to sleep, including the TV in your room, the lights, and yes, your phone, will certainly help you doze off a little easier. Adding something like a hot shower, meditating, or doing light stretching are other great ways to wind down, Oexman told me.
Putting all these things together for 30 days was crucial for me, because juggling a jam-packed schedule of work, exercise, and time for family and friends can sometimes push sleep to the back burner.
But that’s not where it belongs. It just takes a simple change of mindset and a little sacrifice—as with many things in life—to make your sleep as much of a priority as your morning workout.
