By Ysabel Cacho
There’s an age-old fable stating that SCAD is an acronym for “Sleep Comes After Death.”
It was meant to be a joke, but no student is laughing.
Instead, students walk into classrooms with their bloodshot eyes, bags setting deep into their faces, hands clutching their nth cup of coffee as though it was a lifeline. It’s not another round of Humans vs. Zombies that causes students to look like this, it’s actually their lack of proper sleep.
While most of the students try to overcome their lack of sleep with caffeine, David Shaw, the senior director of engineering at Redspin, came up with a different solution. The 24-year-old engineer created an online bedtime calculator called sleepyti.me.
According to an interview with The New York Times, Shaw came up with the website “as a project for my own use, so that when I had to get up or fall asleep at strange times I didn’t need to do any math in my head.”
Sleepyti.me calculates the exact time the user should either wake up or go to bed, depending on his or her sleep cycles. One sleep cycle typically runs for 90 minutes. The site claims that waking up after each sleep cycle is much more effective than waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle. This results in waking up feeling much more refreshed and less tired.
The process is very simple. Users simply enter the time they want to wake up and the website calculates several different bedtimes. It also works the other way around. Users can click the snooze button, which calculates the times they should wake up should they ever fall asleep right at that moment.
Unfortunately, the simplicity ends there.
The tricky part is actually falling asleep. Although sleepyti.me provides the bedtimes, these are the actual times that the user has to be fast asleep. According to the website, it takes the average person 14 minutes to fall asleep, which means that the user should be in bed 14 minutes or so before the calculated bedtime. Another complication is the commitment to do it. The first three tries enables the user to wake up, but they may feel slightly off. However, practice makes perfect, and after a while the user feels ready to spring out of bed to take on the day.
A colleague of mine recommended this website after taking a good look at the dark circles under my eyes. She claimed it was her secret weapon for surviving her workload without pulling all-nighters. Although I am a morning person, I found the simple task of getting out of bed to be a huge challenge. I couldn’t do it without hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock several times, which would sometimes lead to oversleeping.
The first couple of tries were difficult, as it was a struggle for me to get into bed 14 minutes before completely blacking out. However, my internal clock eventually got used to the sensation of falling asleep at a specific time and waking up feeling completely rested. Although I usually do not get the recommended eight hours of sleep, I felt more wide-awake, less cranky and was ready to take on the day.
There are also other bedtime calculators available on websites and as apps. Sleep Cycle is “a bio-alarm clock that analyzes your sleep patterns and wakes you up when you are in the lightest sleep phase” that costs 99 cents. Another website is Sleepytimer, and is very similar to sleepyti.me. The only difference is that Sleepytimer also calculates users’ power-naps.
With these all available online, students can go to class without being forced to look like they stepped off of “The Walking Dead” set.
Perhaps some day someone will actually look back at that “Sleep Comes After Death” joke and laugh. That is a day that no calculator can predict.