Recently, a blinds company called Web-Blinds devised a handy calculator designed to help people determine when they should go to bed. The creators of this handy tool hope that it can help people learn when is the best time to wake up without feeling tired.
According to their website: “Getting a good night’s sleep is about more than simply going to bed early – it’s about waking up at the right time too. Using a formula based on the body’s natural rhythms, the Sleep Calculator will work out the best time for you to rise or go to sleep.”
Before you dismiss them because they’re not a scientific organization, you might want to learn about the thinking behind their technique. You probably know this from how groggy you’ve felt the next day, but going to bed really early isn’t the best way to ensure you feel refreshed and rested in the morning.
Basically, sleep is made up of five stages. At night, we go from a very light sleep (stage 1) to a very deep sleep (stage 4) and then REM, which is the phase where we’re dreaming. If you wake up suddenly, say, by an alarm, in the middle of the wrong cycle, this can affect your level of irritability in the morning.
So now that you have a basic understanding of how it works, you can go ahead and put the time you usually wake up at into the calculator. It will tell you exactly, to the minute, when you should be in bed. So let’s say you want to wake up at 7 AM, then the best bedtimes for you are 9:46 PM, 11:46 PM, 12:46 AM or 2:16 AM.
On the other hand, if you need to wake up at 6 AM, the best times for going to bed so you feel refreshed are 8:46 PM, 10:16 PM, 11:46 PM or 1:16 AM. The calculator takes into consideration the fact that “most people take about 14 minutes to fall asleep”, so the bedtimes also reflect that.
If you’re someone who has trouble waking up in the morning, or if you’ve tried those sleeping apps without any success, you might want to give this clever calculator a try!
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