Gadget: Zeo Sleep Manager

GETTING a good night’s sleep can be tricky. There are so many factors that can affect your slumber: caffeine intake, stress, temperature, percentage of REM sleep to light sleep, the list is endless.

And it’s often not the most obvious factor that could be preventing you from achieving optimum shut-eye, as I found out when testing the Zeo Sleep Manager.

There are, loosely, two types of sleep, NREM (non-rapid eye movement) and REM. REM sleep accounts for only around 20-25 per cent of total sleep in adults – and a higher percentage of this typically means you feel more like Bugs Bunny than Jack Dee the next day.

Enter the Zeo Sleep Manager. The key component is the rechargeable Bluetooth headband. This connects wirelessly to either an iPhone or Android-based Smartphone and records your brain activity and sleep patterns. Whether it was the excitement of seeing what my brain was getting up to at night or the sensor strapped to my forehead, dropping off proved problematic at first. I seemed to have acclimatised after the third night and had a graphical mountain range of sleep activity to interpret whilst munching my muesli. It was quite fascinating – I could see my midnight trip to the loo and a long period of restorative sleep between 2am and 4am. A “ZQ sleep score” is produced so I could easily see if the “7 steps to Sleep Fitness” coaching was doing the trick.

Although sleep coaching is a bit trial and error, getting to bed just 15 minutes earlier had a substantial effect on my REM sleep ratio. There’s also a cunning “SmartWake Alarm” to prevent you being dragged kicking and screaming from a lovely period of REM.

If you can get over the sensor stuck to your forehead, the Zeo Sleep Manager offers a myriad of tools to improve your ratio of sweet dreams to ugly wakeups.

• Zeo Sleep Manager, £89, for more information see myzeo.co.uk