Conquering my insomnia (December, 20)

Conquering my insomnia

   I just finished writing about being sleepy in the daytime. Today I will describe the other side of the problem - sleeping good at night.

   I don't think that I'm the only person in the world who has problems with sleep. Our lifestyle, especially with a lot of information coming from our electronic gadgets, affects our biorhythm, so our brain is still active when it’s time to get rest. Writing this post, I only want to share my experience and some solutions I found, and I also want to describe one of my projects related to sleep.

   When I try to sleep I care about proper light and good back-ground music. I like when light dims gradually, until it turns off. Also I like to listen to some slow music or audio books. BGM and proper lighting help me to relax and get sleepy. The problem is how to turn off my music player or light in my room after I have successfully fallen asleep. I could use a timer on my light but if I set it for 30 minutes it would bother me thinking about how much time was left for it to turn off. My music player doesn’t even have a function of turning off after certain time.

   While I was thinking about how to solve those problems, the teacher in my programming school gave us a task - to invent an idea of some small, useful, and easy to build home device which could be controlled by a micro-computer. That's when I thought about my “Sleep-o-matic” robot! It could have color LED lights to create soft, dispersed light in my bedroom. It could also have speakers to play my audiobooks, slow music, or some sounds of nature - the rustle of trees or sound of the surf. I could also implement a movement sensor inside it, so my robot will know when I slept, because when people fall asleep they don’t turn over for a while. So my robot could wait until my first turn over and switch off light and sound. In addition, it could have an alarm function to wake me up in the morning with the sound of chirping birds.

   I’m going to announce my idea tomorrow. I hope my classmates will like it and join my sleep-o-matic team!

Good night to everyone. Don’t forget to turn off the lights and music!