RISE: Sleep Tracker app reviews

Absolutely amazing app, changed my life

As someone who has suffered through decades of sleeplessness from chronic insomnia and c-PTSD, I’m diagnosed with ADHD, MDD, PMDD, chronic fatigue, & iron deficiency anemia amongst other things but those are my top contributors to insomnia. I was really losing hope when more than 8 different sleep aid medications were unsuccessful. I started looking for sleep tracking apps and books to read about how to improve your sleep naturally when I stumbled upon this app with no prior knowledge of its existence. Since then I’ve been utilizing almost every feature the Rise app offers, and I was sold WELL before my trial was up. It’s worth the annual fee. Rise helps me to accurately track things like my nightly melatonin window, my predicted energy peaks and dips throughout the day, and my “wake zone” aka the best time for me to wake up in order to feel refreshed in the morning. I sync it up to my calendar so that I can decide the best time frames for planning activities that take more or less brainpower for me. I can see my actual sleep debt, was able to follow a super easy & straightforward plan to reduce that number from double digits to almost zero. When I have a poor nights sleep, I can see the amount of sleep I owe myself and I can catch up much faster than I would have before when I used to just let it stack up. Even when I have my awful nights of insomnia, I just use Rise to figure out how much extra sleep or naps I need to aim for to make up for it. I also wear a Fitbit that tracks my sleep super accurately and the data is synced to Rise every morning, but it would still work without one because it uses nightstand motion detection as a fallback and if it gets your sleep wrong, you can just manually change the input yourself when you get up. Sometimes the app thinks I was asleep when I wasn’t, and that can get kind of annoying because it’ll start telling me my morning energy peak is approaching but it’s 4am and I still just haven’t been able to sleep, lol. But I figured out that all I have to do is either ignore it completely and it’ll reset itself when I actually wake up later, OR I just manually put in an estimation of when I’m going to try to sleep/wake up and then I fix the hours later on to accurately reflect when I actually get up that day. It’s just frustrating because if the app decides you slept from 10pm - 2am but you were really just playing video games the whole time, it doesn’t let you delete it so I can’t change it until the following day. That’s the only negative thing about the entire app though. 9.5/10 stars for sure. I didn’t even get into half of the features I use like their suggested time frames for taking a melatonin supplement, nightly brain dump notification, evening/morning routine planning, when to avoid caffeine, and even linking your partner so you can see where THEIR sleep debt is and whether or not they’re gonna be crabby, lol. I just worried that I was already writing way too much so I kept it as short as possible. If you have insomnia and you’re desperate for a more “natural” treatment, try this out. It rocks.