How to get a better night's sleep with the Zeo Sleep Manager

According to recent statistics, people just aren’t getting enough sleep, whether it’s our crazy lifestyles, too much social networking or non-stop worrying, it seems our tired little heads are really paying the price.

The important thing is, getting good quality sleep every night doesn’t just make you feel more refreshed the next day, it also has a direct impact on your overall health and wellbeing.

So, you can try some simple home remedies right now, like sprinkling lavender oil on your pillow, getting a warm bath or turning off all kinds of computers, phones and tablets before 8pm. But surely in this day and age isn’t there an app to help us out?

Well, yes. There are plenty of applications available that are specially designed to help you monitor your sleep and wake up at the optimum time for your body, like Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock and Proactive Sleep Alarm Clock.

Although some people probably find these apps work well for them, at the end of the day they’re only apps and there’s only so much they can tell us.

A new product called Zeo Sleep Manager aims to go one step further than most of the solutions currently available and brings us a comprehensive system which will monitor how much sleep we’re REALLY getting every night.

Already super successful in the States, the Zeo launches in the UK this week and we got the chance to have a hands-on (or heads-on!?) with the product.

The Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile consists of an app (both iOS and Android), bedside device and headband. Basically you wear the headband and its built-in sensors detect what’s going on and send all kinds of information about how you’re sleeping via Bluetooth to the app, meaning you can wake up in the morning and review how you slept. You can view how much time you spent in REM and Deep Sleep and also get a Zeo score which will tell you how well you’re sleeping in comparison to other people your age.

However, the system isn’t just about presenting you with flashy data, if you visit the MySleep section on the Zeo website you can keep track of your sleeping, as well as find online coaching tools to help you improve your sleep and find out what’s going wrong.

We tried the Zeo out for ourselves last night and found it worked really well and gave us a VERY easy-to-understand reading with different colours representing different stages of sleep. The only thing I’d say is girls (or guys) with long hair should wear it up or you’ll have a weird hair band, crease thing the next morning.

According to Zeo’s CTO and co-founder, Ben Rubin, it takes a week to get a really accurate picture of how you’re sleeping, so watch out for our views on the Zeo after we’ve tried it out for a whole seven days, as well as a hands-on video with the device and its app friend.

The Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile is available to pre-order now for £89.00.