The Sleep Journal is a vital component of the Zeo experience. It allows you to record how you felt about your previous night of sleep. This will give you some real insight into the quality of your sleep. After all, getting a good night’s sleep means feeling like you got a good night’s sleep.

The Sleep History shows your various nights, weeks, or even months of sleep at a glance, allowing you to see how it can fluctuate over time. You can filter this data to show ZQ, Total Z, Time in Deep, Time in REM, Time in Wake, and Times Woken, making it quick and easy to spot trends in your sleep behavior.

Hot baths are used by various people with insomnia to assist with sleep, in particular people who have complains of insomnia and difficulty falling asleep.  The idea is that you heat core body temperature up a little bit before bedtime which then, when you get out of the bath, leads to a kind of relatively more-rapid decline in body temperature, which is thought to then assist with sleep-onset.  There have been studies showing that this has been effective, particularly in older insomniacs.

The formal term for banking sleep is "sleep extension."  By getting a good night's sleep, subjects of an earlier 2009 study were able to stay more alert than those who didn't bank sleep before undergoing a week straight of only 3 hours of sleep a night.  Banking sleep also led to higher scores on various cognitive tests, though don't wait until the night before an exam to start getting more.

It can take several days, if not weeks, to recover from a spell of sleeplessness. Keep in mind that habitual good sleeping is the best way to recover sleep and start feeling balanced again. Relax and give yourself time to recoup your "sleep debt," which are the hours of sleep lost that must be repaid.

A good question - there's quite a bit of science that suggests the answer is "NO", but I'll get to that in a little bit. First let's talk about different things people are trying to get by on less sleep.

First, there's the class of people who, by increasing their sleep quality, can get by with less time in bed:

There's no doubt about the importance of a dark environment for sleeping. In the pre-electric past, people naturally got sleepy and went to bed after the sun went down.

When we have a regularly scheduled sleep pattern mixed with lower light conditions in the evenings, sleep comes more easily due to [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin]melatonin[/url] release after the sun goes down, as part of our body's circadian rhythms.

Tilo, a tea made from the flowers of trees in the Linden genus, is well-known for its soothing effect. Naturally-occurring compounds in Linden tea trigger the benzodiazepine receptors in the brain, which are the same class of receptors targets by modern pharmaceutical-grade hypnotics such as Valium. As such it's still listed in the German Pharmacopoeia for treating anxiety and insomnia.

Jetlag is a real pain; it's difficult to adjust to a new time zone quickly and that lag leaves us feeling cranky, exhausted, and often throws our sleep schedule off.