How a Smart Home Can Improve Your Sleep

February 15, 2023

You likely know you can use your smart home technology to coordinate your entire morning, from replacing your alarm clock with friendly greetings and gentle morning chiming to controlling your lights, locks, and thermostat when you leave for the day.

However, what you may not know is you can also use your smart home to help you sleep better. And, not only can you use your smart home's device-enabled features to help you get to sleep at night, but you can also use some other nifty features designed specifically to help you obtain a more deeper, restorative sleep. For instance, you can also optimize your wake times for matching your REM cycle.

Below are ways your smartphone can improve your sleep.

1. Dim Your Lights

You already know you can turn your lights on and off through your smartphone, but as you're winding down for bedtime, you can also dim your lights. Dimming your lights will help you acclimate your brain to sleep mode.

Plus, there are also features that allow you to set a sleep-time routine where your lights are turned off in the bedrooms, and your other lights throughout your home are turned on a night-light setting, making it easier for you to see in the middle of the night for a bathroom trip or a midnight trip to the fridge.

2. Relaxing Sounds

Many people like complete silence when they're sleeping. However, more people are opting for relaxing sounds to help them go to sleep and stay asleep, particularly white noise.

White noises reduce your sensitivity to other noise, and deliver sound evenly across all your audible frequencies. It creates a type of masking effect, keeping other sounds from disturbing you during the night. Smart home technology offers white noise features to help you improve your sleep.

3. Circadian Lighting

There are smart light bulbs you can use for controlling your smartphone lighting. However, you can also change your lighting color and color temperature. Regular white lighting can simulate daylight because it takes on a blue cast. With smart lighting, you can mimic a candle's golden glow, which can be soothing, and you get into a relaxed state.

4. Read or Play an Audiobook

Your smart home technology can even play an audiobook, or read you to sleep. It can read an ebook out loud with a friendly computerized voice, or play an audiobook. So the next time you're in the mood for a good audiobook to help put you to sleep, you can rely on your smart home to read it for you.

5. Sleep Aid Device

One particular type of sleep aid device is a light casting system that works by shining a rhythmic light pattern on the ceiling of your bedroom, helping to:

• Regulate your breathing pattern
• Make you feel relaxed
• Cause you to fall asleep

After 20 minutes, it shuts itself off automatically.

6. Cool Your Home

The temperature in your bedroom can also influence your sleep. This is because your body associates the cold feeling with a cool night, thereby telling it it's time for sleep.

As you're winding down and getting ready for bed, the technology can drop your home's temperature so you're chilly, which causes you to climb into bed, and curl up under your blankets.

7. Security System

A smart security system provides you with peace of mind. It can respond to a command to lock your home down, and secure all the windows and doors. So, you can go to bed with peace of mind that you're safe and tucked in your home for the night. This peace of mind can help you sleep better because you know your smart home will wake you up if there's a breach in any way, or movement detected.

Over the past several years, smart home technology has become very cool, and not just for activities for when you're awake. Now, smart homes can help you sleep more soundly, too.

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Also in Eco Terra's Healthy Sleep Blog