I have night owl in my blood. Really. It just comes naturally to me. Plus, I’m always afraid of missing something, or I think I can cram in ONE more page, one more minute of an audio book, one more activity. Often, this kind of thinking finds me feeling like crap at 2 or 3 am, wondering why I am so stupid.

The next morning, either I feel gross because I didn’t get enough sleep or I feel gross because I got too much. Either way, all too often I have felt like the “hit by a truck” statement could be applied to me in the morning. (NO, I’m not grumpy in the morning, generally–I’m just not happy sunshiny either.

Everything changed last year. In the summer, I got an iPhone, and in the fall, a friend introduced the Sleep Cycle app to me.

Sleep Cycle is an app that uses the accelerometer built into the iPhone (and iPod Touch) to track your sleep patterns, and then wake you up in the general vicinity of when you’d like to wake up (within the half hour before, usually), but when you’re at the edge of a sleep cycle. That is, it wakes you up when you’re not in deep sleep, which is the most shocking phase to get awoken out of.

It’s really quite simple: you plug your phone in (the app drains about 30% of battery over the night), set your alarm sound (you can use a song from your iTunes) and a time you’d like to be awake by,  click “Start”, then lay the phone glass-side down on the edge of your bed. Then, you entrust your wake-up call to this genius application.

It is. Genius. I promise you. It has revolutionized my mornings, which, in turn, has revolutionized my days. I no longer wake up hating the day, hating myself, hating the fact that I have to get out of bed… oops, I said I wasn’t grumpy in the mornings. I’m not, I promise you, but now I actually FEEL good as well!

Oh, and there’s a handy graph feature where you can look back at all the nights you have used Sleep Cycle to compare your patterns. Also, what kind of app would it be if it didn’t have a “Share on Facebook” feature? I kid you not. I have so far restrained myself, though.

Solid app. Well done, Sleep Cycle people!

YES, it’s worth the 99 cents! What are you waiting for?!

I’m saying good-night…