Power Nap iPhone App: The cure for waking up groggy after a nap

by | Apr 4, 2014 | Technology

Takeaway: Power Nap will wake you up from your nap before you fall into a deep sleep (measuring your sleep phase through your iPhone’s accelerometer), so you don’t wake up groggy.

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You know that feeling where you wake up from a nap groggier than you were before?

That groggy feeling, called “sleep inertia”, happens whenever you’re abruptly woken up from a deep sleep;1 the deeper you are in your sleep, the groggier you are when you’re woken up.2 This is why you wake up refreshed when you don’t set an alarm: your body has a chance to complete a full sleep cycle, so it wakes up naturally when you’re in a light sleep.

Enter the Power Nap app (available only for iPhone). Power Nap is made by the same folks who created Sleep Cycle; the powerful iPhone app that tracks your sleep phase and wakes you up when you’re in a light sleep. Power Nap also tracks your movements as you sleep through your iPhone’s accelerometer, and wakes you up when you’re in a light sleep phase of your nap, before you fall into a deep sleep.

The app has three modes:

  • Power Nap: Up to a 20-minute nap. The app will wake you up within 20 minutes, before you fall into a deep sleep.
  • Recovery Nap: Up to a 45-minute nap. The app will wake you up within 45 minutes, before you fall into a deep sleep.
  • 1 Sleep Cycle: The app will wake you up after you complete one full sleep cycle. The average sleep cycle is about 90 minutes.

I use (and highly recommend) Sleep Cycle as an alarm clock–since I started using the app a few years ago, I haven’t woken up groggy once, not counting the times I only got a few hours of rest. Power Nap is the perfect companion app to Sleep Cycle. If you like to nap and own an iPhone, at $1.99 this app is a no-brainer, and there is no other app like it on the market today.

I’m not affiliated with these folks in any way, I’m just a big fan of the app.

  1. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia 

  2. Source: http://www.helpguide.org/life/sleeping.htm 

Written by Chris Bailey

Chris Bailey has written hundreds of articles on the subject of productivity and is the author of three books: How to Calm Your Mind, Hyperfocus, and The Productivity Project. His books have been published in more than 40 languages. Chris writes about productivity on this site and speaks to organizations around the globe on how they can become more productive without hating the process.

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