A while ago, I submitted a request for feedback on a weekend project I had, designed to help you wake up more refreshed. I called it sleepyti.me [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781423 ].
I didn't expect too much to come of it, since I created it originally to learn jQuery and for my own personal use. Through the feedback and improvements suggested from my HN post (and later a reddit post), I launched and became mildly popular on Reddit and StumbleUpon.
These days, I'm ramen profitable--a small webapp isn't a startup, but the supplemental income from the occasional banner click is nice. I serve approximately 30,000 hits per day according to Google Analytics, and I've been covered by several news outlets and blogs (LifeHacker, MSNBC, The Toronto Star, TheNextWeb, CNet and more). I even had a brief affiliate agreement with a YC company, but unfortunately the terms didn't serve either side as well as I would have liked--we parted amicably.
It seems that sleepyti.me has come full circle - HN was the first community to ever see the site in action. Without the encouragement of the few comments I received here and on reddit, as well as the inspiration of all the awesome projects HN members created, this never would have happened.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you guys have, or listen to any suggestions - I'm thinking about putting an FAQ on the site for common issues, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
It gives me a motivational boost to know that such a simple thing that I (think I could) hack in less than a day (with all due respect and everything) can be ramen profitable, especially when it seem that more can be built from this.
The following is only peripherally related, but would appreciate nuggets of knowledge.
These days stimulants get a lot of press, from adderall to ritalin to modafinil etc., not to mention plain old caffeine. Caffeine, at least, I know work by blocking those receptors that signal the feeling of sleepiness. I am curious to know about the opposite: chemicals, or enzymes if you will, that catalyzes the important reactions that takes place when we sleep. I am sure there will be a lot of benefit to speeding those reactions up. You would be more refreshed for the same amount of sleep, or need less.
Rather than smothering fatigue signals with a stimulant I would like to make my body more efficient at sleeping.
Sure this is a very complicated problem, even cataloging what all those reactions are is a huge task. But would be a rapt audience to anyone who can share any information along these lines.
For me, the 14 minute rule just does not work. Sometimes I wish I had someone to knock me out cold with a baseball bat, or that inner voice that keeps talking and planning and refuses to STFU.
I use L-Theanine[1] capsules in combination with caffeine to sharpen my thinking; it works great, but if taken without caffeine, it can be a bit of a relaxant/depressant, which can make it easier to sleep. The jury's still out on its effects on serotonin, but anecdotally, it seems to help me sleep easier and more deeply.
The second thing is a falling-asleep routine that I think is probably closer to self-hypnosis than simple relaxation. I consciously slow my breathing and hold after each breath in or out for a 3-count. At the same time, I sort of visualize a wave moving slowly down my body from the top of my head, and where ever it touches, I relax those muscles. I'm usually asleep before it hits the legs. If it fails, I restart the exercise, with a 4-count on the breaths, and so on. Most nights, I'm asleep in just a couple of minutes; my wife frequently remarks on how fast I go from alert to dead asleep.
The effort of concentrating on both exercises tends to silence the "inner voice", and consciously relaxing muscles tends to remove blocks to sleeping that I didn't know were there; the nights that you can't sleep, you're probably laying there in bed clenching some set of muscles without realizing it.
Instead of capsules, you could also go for green tea - the better brands (go at least with proper loose leaves or matcha etc.) have Theanine cranked to 11.
Definitely. I first learned about theanine in the context of green tea. I'm a coffee drinker, though, and wanted the benefits without changing my drink. :)
Yeah, I thought it would be something like that. The other option might be green tea extracts, but I have no experience with these and you may end up with a higher caffeine dose, even though green tea is usually far lower on the caffeine than coffee.
I remember reading about a drug that removes the need for sleep in the first place a while back. Sure sleep would be nice once in a while, but the benefits are pretty obvious.
FWIW, the key, sleep-inducing ingredient is melatonin, which you can pick up at most any drug store for a few bucks. It’s often recommended for people with sleep problems.
Except in the UK where it's prescription-only, and marked with a little "harmful triangle" in the reference guide Doctors use :-/ I ended up getting some from a site called Doctor Fox which claims to be legit NHS.
Cool little hack, however, I'm not convinced of its accuracy. There are a lot of assumptions at play here. The biggest being that you need to be able to control exactly when you fall asleep.
I have no idea how long it normally takes me to actually fall asleep, and I think the average 14 minutes you refer to will highly vary among people. Basically the entire calculation is ruined if it takes a little longer than I expect to fall asleep. Plus, if I knew that I was being timed, that small sense of urgency would keep me awake.
Something like this, to give you a good starting point, combined with something like the SleepCycle iOS app, to get the wake-up timing more precise, seem like a great combination.
Ah, but it doesn't have to predict the best cycle! I am fairly sure that even a rough approximation is better than nothing. And, depending on the distribution of optimal sleep-cycle times, their guesses could actually be pretty good for most people.
To be useful, something just has to be better than other options as long as you factor any costs in as well. Since this site does not have any significant costs, it just has to be even little better than nothing to be useful.
Finally, even if the actual calculations aren't useful, it did get me to think about working out better sleep patterns, which is likely to be healthy in and of itself. (Who am I kidding, I'm probably going to forget... but it's a nice thought :P.)
I use this site daily. I used this last night. I see you have updated the site a bit ;)
I also recommend this to almost everyone! Also, I suggest that you have a .com domain name to redirect to sleepti.me? This is because I spend a great deal of time and effort explaining the domain name - sleepyti.me :| Instead of having something like: "sleepytime.com". Sleepyti.me works great when typed but not when spoken (word-of-mouth). Just my 2 cents.
I'm interested to know if you have you been having consistent results using it? I tested it last night, and just woke up several minutes ago in fact, feeling refreshed and ready to go. I've been having trouble waking up even with an alarm, and I usually wake up feeling not so good. With this, I woke up at the very instant of my alarm, choosing the 3rd option. Then again, it could be because I was too excited to try out something new, although I was initially skeptical about it.
I think the results are very good for me. When I wake up using Sleepytime, I usually feel refreshed and able to do push-ups and some stretching early in the morning.
1) Just right before sleeping, check sleepytime
2) Set alarm
3) I wake up refreshed
Note: I have a very flex schedule, so this works for me.
I just tested this application by going to sleep on the first choice. I asked my wife to wake me up at the specified time. I heard her coming upstairs to wake me up.
I was completely in shock. I sleep through 2-3 alarms every morning. Also, I had a dream in which I could recall every detail. This only happens once every year or two for me.
This has prompted me to research my sleeping habits and possibly do a sleep study to seek better habits.
Will this really work though? I've been taught that sleep cycles are very individual and you should measure your own by doing the following.
Next evening, stay up late, when you start to get tired start a timer and force yourself to be up until you're a little less tired (sleep cycle), then use the timer somehow to calculate your sleep cycle. Sorry for trailing off there but I don't really remember the specifics but I remember I calculated my own sleep cycle to be 1.5 hours back then.
So far all I've done with this information is that if my alarm is set to 06:10, and I wake up at 05:45, I get up instead of trying to go back to sleep.
I'd only seriously try to go back to sleep if I woke up at around 04:30-04:45.
Through some studying of my sleeping habits (polyphasic sleeping for more than two months now etc.), I can say that the 90 minute rule breaks down around the 2 cycle mark - it is usually preferable to sleep 3.5 hours and not 3, particularly when you want to sustain a schedule that sticks to a main sleep that short.
This may not sound like a big deal, but for me, the difference has been night and day, where adding that half hour made the schedule sustainable in the first place.
Cute idea, but my understanding is that each individual's sleep cycle can vary a fair bit from that average. I know for sure that the amount of time it takes me to fall asleep varies widely.
I've been using this website on my phone then setting my alarm based on the output and it has been great. I can't say if it's a placebo effect or if the science is correct but I feel less sluggish when I wake up and get going more easily so I'll keep using it!
Interesting thought. Pretty useless for people like me - it takes me 2-4 hours to fall asleep usually. It would be helpful if you could include an option for setting how long it usually takes one to fall asleep, and adjust the calculations accordingly.
Also for those interested, I've found the wakemate to be pretty useful and pretty accurate, especially for someone like me who has an enormous period of time I might fall asleep in. It works as an actigraph to capture your sleep patterns and determine the ideal point to wake you, in a given time range you specify. Of course, the solution presented here is a bit cheaper =)
Wow, it's always taken me about an hour (sometimes two) to, but 4 is pretty rough. Care to share why this is, and how you combat it? I do the regular stuff, but have also come to embrace it since I often have pretty productive thoughts.
I can't have been the only one to look at the source code of the page and feel slightly disappointed, considering that the page itself looks pretty nice. I'm looking forward to seeing if following 90-minute sleep-cycles would work out for me, though.
A novel first dip into the waters of sleep optimization for first timers, but I'm a bit wary of the blanket approach that's being taken. Much like others in this thread, It'd be cool if they linked to some studies.
This is excellent - I'd recommend supplementing it with links to supporting information (why 90 minutes == 1 sleep cycle) and also information on caffeine intake/half-life.
A while ago, I submitted a request for feedback on a weekend project I had, designed to help you wake up more refreshed. I called it sleepyti.me [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781423 ].
I didn't expect too much to come of it, since I created it originally to learn jQuery and for my own personal use. Through the feedback and improvements suggested from my HN post (and later a reddit post), I launched and became mildly popular on Reddit and StumbleUpon.
These days, I'm ramen profitable--a small webapp isn't a startup, but the supplemental income from the occasional banner click is nice. I serve approximately 30,000 hits per day according to Google Analytics, and I've been covered by several news outlets and blogs (LifeHacker, MSNBC, The Toronto Star, TheNextWeb, CNet and more). I even had a brief affiliate agreement with a YC company, but unfortunately the terms didn't serve either side as well as I would have liked--we parted amicably.
It seems that sleepyti.me has come full circle - HN was the first community to ever see the site in action. Without the encouragement of the few comments I received here and on reddit, as well as the inspiration of all the awesome projects HN members created, this never would have happened.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you guys have, or listen to any suggestions - I'm thinking about putting an FAQ on the site for common issues, but haven't gotten around to it yet.