Newcastle Photographer and Content Creator, Mandy Charlton, Always on a quest for adventure, often seen on buses, trains and planes. On a quest to be happier and healthier. Lives in Newcastle with her 3 cats, Iris, Maggie and Arthur. Loves good vibes, musicals and cakes. Full time professional wedding photographer in the north east of england alongside content creator on Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

How to get a better nights sleep, the Resmed S+






Holly Bobbins has lots of talents and one of them is the ability to sleep wherever she is, sometimes she even likes to be tucked in like a todder (see first photo) but I have the worst sleeping patterns, last night for instance I woke up 14 times according to my Resmed S+ sleep monitor, just to put some perspective onto that, I think my score last night was 68/100 erm, not so good!

Why am I telling you this, I hear you asking, well before Looby went to hospital, when it was still winter a collaboration happened with the lovely people who make the S+, they were about to launch and offered to send me a sleep monitor to see if it could help me get a better nights sleep.

So fast forward to coming home and sleeping in hospital had been so bad that it had reset my sleep patterns and I found I was suddenly able to get 11 hours of unbroken sleep, now I obviously wouldn't recommend this as a course of making you get a better nights sleep and it didn't last unfortunately as you can probably guess from the first lines I wrote.



So, let me tell you about what's going on with my Sleep+, it's a nifty little box which sits beside your bed and all you need to do is take it out of the box, plug it in, make sure it's aligned with your chest when you lay in bed and then connect the app on your smartphone.  It took me about 5 minutes to set the whole thing up.

 

Once you have it set up and you've answered some questions about where you sleep, your age, health etc you press the button to start sleep and every day you're asked how much alcohol you've had, how much caffeine you've had an how much exercise you've done that day as well as how stressed you were that day, for me it's always 3-4 cups of coffee, mostly 20-30 mins of exercise, mostly no alcohol and very nearly always slightly stressed as I have anxiety!

Once that's all done you can choose if you would like a helpful sound to get you to sleep and do you need a smart alarm, I like waking up to the sounds of the birds in the forest every day, it wakes me up in a half hour window when it thinks it's best, I have to say I usually get annoyed with it if it's even a minute before the time I wanted my alarm to go off but that's just me, haha!

In the morning when you end your sleep, the fun begins, you get all manner of information in the form of pie charts about how you slept, you get an over all sleep score which is scored out of 100 and then the sleep mentor gives you tips about what you could do so that you get a better nights sleep.


Now a couple of weeks after I received my S+ they offered to send me another for Iain, Iain has a melatonin imbalance which is quite common in people with Aspergers, his sleep scores range from 50-70 and this week he's started to take the actions that the sleep mentor suggests (much to my actual shock, it's not easy to get teenagers to do anything you ask).  We're now wrangling over who takes Holly Bobbins for walkies as the S+ keeps suggesting that he gets some exercise, this of course doesn't help me in my quest to do 10k a day!!


I think the S+ is a great machine and I still feel I haven't had enough time to tell you if it's going to work or not, I do follow the suggestions every night but I think these things take time and what I'd love to do is write another article 6 months from now so I can really tell you about the changes in our lives it's helped us to make.  Iain has never slept well or had what you would call normal sleeping patterns so if it manages to help him do that then we really could put it in the "life changing" box.

I know there are other sleep monitors but this one is unique because you don't have to stay attached to it, I have an Apple watch for example but I can't wear that at night because I need to charge it every night.  I would say that you have to keep your phone beside your bed plugged in but I always charge it overnight anyway.

I want to also thank the S+ for helping me actually have chats with my teenager, every day when he wakes up we now swap tales of our nights sleep, what our scores were and what suggestions we had for the day and I can tell you, anything which provides a reason for a teenager to talk to his mother is not a bad thing at all ;)

The Resmed S+ is available here and costs £129.99, I was sent two of these monitors in exchange for writing a review but as always these are my very own thoughts and opinions.
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