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- The Sleep Cycle app optimizes your morning alarm for when you're the furthest out of your REM cycle.
- The app finds the perfect moment within a specified time frame for your alarm.
- I use the Sleep Cycle app every day and it's completely changed how grumpy I am in the morning.
Sleep Cycle Application Check price at Sleep Cycle Check price at Apple Store Check price at Google Play Store When it comes to my sleeping habits, I'll admit I'm lucky: Once I'm out, I am OUT. I can't make it through a glass of wine without nodding off at 10:30 p.m. Name the place — a game night with friends, "Summer House" marathons in front of the couch — and I will conk out.
However, this also means that waking me up when I'm not ready is akin to nudging a hibernating bear. I won't just wake up groggy and annoyed — I'll look at the person (or just my phone) who woke me up like they just ruined my entire day without repair, which they did!
Thankfully, a few years, back, I came upon Sleep Cycle, an app that records you while you sleep (sounds creepy, I'll explain!) to wake you up at the best possible moment.
What does the Sleep Cycle app do?
Sleep Cycle's premise is simple: It wakes you up within a 30-minute time frame of your choosing, based on when your sleep is the lightest. For example, if I have to get up by 7:30 a.m. at the latest, the app will wake me up sometime between 7:00 and 7:30.
Since sleep is cyclical, the app can predict, with great accuracy, when I'm most awake based on when I'm moving around the most. If I'm tossing and turning at 7:10, the alarm will go off then rather than 7:30, even though I'm technically still asleep. (R.E.M., the deepest sleep stage, is when your body becomes immobile, so you definitely don't want to be woken up then — that explains the grogginess people feel when their standard alarm clocks go off in the middle of this sleep phase).
How much is the Sleep Cycle app?
I use the free version of Sleep Cycle, which comes with all of the features above. But I've also tried Premium ($9.99 per month; $40 for the year), which is great if you could use special features to help you fall asleep or figure out why you struggle to.
One Premium feature I liked was tracking different factors, like alcohol or exercise, to see how much of an impact they have on my sleep. The results were predictable (jogging is great! Alcohol, not so much.) but it was still enlightening to see such a direct correlation between margaritas and morning grumpiness.
Cons to consider
The only real downside I've experienced is that I share a bed with my partner, and sometimes he'll rustle around before I do, triggering the alarm (and subsequent glares from me). But with the amount of healthy, consistent sleep I get from this app, I can manage the occasional rude awakening.
The only other thing is if I accidentally close out of the app instead of hitting the button to stop the alarm, the app doesn't seem to record the amount of time I slept, so my data for the week is incomplete. Since I generally don't look back on that data too much, I don't mind, but for anyone trying to track their habits, this can be an annoying thing to have to remember!
The bottom line
It can sound really finicky, needing to be woken up at the exact right time, but it makes such a huge impact on my life. To me, it feels as drastic as being woken up by someone lightly drawing the curtains instead of yelling through a megaphone.
Beyond the day-to-day benefits, Sleep Cycle will show me my full week's recap, so I can notice when I've had multiple nights in a row of only getting six hours of sleep (and help me immediately understand why I'm so cranky).
It's also taught me that getting at least seven hours of sleep doesn't mean hopping into bed at 11 p.m. and waking up at 6 a.m. — I have to factor in the time it takes to actually fall asleep, which can take up to 30 minutes or an hour (especially if, like me, you're up tapping through TikToks until 11:45 for no reason).
Sleep Cycle Application Check price at Apple Store Check price at Sleep Cycle Check price at Google Play Store 
Julia Pugachevsky Senior Health Reporter Julia is a senior health reporter on the Insider Health team primarily covering skincare and relationships. Prior to that, she was the education and personal development editor on the Insider Reviews team and a sex and relationships editor at Cosmopolitan and BuzzFeed, respectively. You can say hi to Julia at jpugachevsky@businessinsider.com or shoot her a DM on Twitter or Instagram (she is @jaypugz on both) Read more Read lessncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufonyowcidnKxnmJqurcDHaKqlnZWleqTFwqWcZpmgpXqzsdWinLA%3D