The SleepQ app for iPhone is powerful, convenient and affordable.  As an at-home sleep trainer, it has the potential to rapidly improve confidence and awareness in sleep, which in turn can lead to less dependency on sleeping pills or alcohol for sleep.  This improvement in sleep can be accomplished in the comfort of your own home, in the perhaps not-so-comfortable setting of your bedroom where insomnia dwells.  Based on the scientifically-proven method of Intensive Sleep Retraining, SleepQ is available in the App Store for under $5, about the cost of one large espresso drink or a couple nights of sleeping pills.

But despite all of the compelling reasons to download and use the app, one fact will always remain about behavioral conditioning:  It takes effort.  Just like physical conditioning, but without the euphoria.  Let’s be honest:  When we’re out of shape physically, we all know what we need to do:  work out (train).  When you’re really tired because you haven’t been sleeping well, you just want to, well, sleep.  Like physical exercise, you need to train for sleep efficiently and effectively.  In a gym, you have machines and devices with timers, variable resistance, different amounts of weight, etc.  Runners and bikers can track miles.  Swimmers do laps.  You know the drill.

But how about sleep training?  Assuming you don’t have a clinical sleep laboratory with expensive equipment and technicians, how do you do it?  Set your alarm clock for short naps?  That would work well if only your clock knew when you fell asleep.  Ask your spouse to wake you over and over?  Not likely to work very well.  And after a couple of hours of sleep training, it would be nice to see how you did on a graph.

Yep, you guessed it:  the SleepQ app for iPhone can do all this.  It knows when you fall asleep, it wakes you after just the right amount of sleep, guides you from one sleep trial to the next, then provides you with a very informative summary graph that you can save and share (e.g., with your doctor).  To increase your chances of falling asleep each sleep trial, you need to be tired/sleepy, so a couple hours in the late afternoon/early evening after any rough night of sleep is best.

It takes some effort to condition yourself to sleep better.  But it is oh so worthwhile!

Til Morning,

Michael