Wake Mode Convinced My Child To Go To Bed

iOS/Android: If you didn’t sleep well last night, you’ll be tired today. Duh, right? Wake Mode shows your tiredness as a battery level for your body. For you and me, that’s a cute gimmick. For my seven-year-old, it was a compelling argument for actually going to sleep.

This was me. The kid slept much better.

After all, he knows the panic that sets in when he’s watching YouTube and gets a low battery warning. You have to plug in right away, or else! So when he saw that his own body’s energy level was in the red, he suddenly became very interested in going to bed.

I helped him install Wake Mode last night around bedtime. The app asks what time you went to bed the previous night, how long it took you to actually fall asleep, and what time you woke up. From those numbers, it makes a good guess about how sleep-deprived you are.

My kid and I were both around 10 per cent. We turned on manual sleep tracking for his phone (Wake Mode can also read data from a wearable fitness tracker, if you have one) and he hit the sack. I stayed up a little later, and then the baby woke me up around 2AM. I was still bleary eyed in the morning when my kid came running in the room, shouting, “Look, Mum! I’m at 100 per cent!”

Wake Mode encourages you to “boost your energy” during the day with caffeine or power naps; a diet coke gave me an extra two per cent. At night, the app asks how your day went, to better calibrate your energy level for the future. It also has a nice dashboard for viewing your sleep tracking data, if you like to monitor that sort of thing. Apps like Wake Mode don’t really tell you anything that your body doesn’t already know. You get tired when you don’t sleep, after all. But it can be handy to see that battery level declining — and it might even be the nudge you need to finally turn off your phone and go to sleep.