Use this app to improve your sleep

The importance of sleep is very well researched. Any search in the medical research directory pubmed about sleep will reveal how lack of sleep increases risks of diseases like diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's and cancer. Quite simply, if you don't recover from the stresses of daily life with good sleep, your body is much more likely to fail you.

Even the act of producing energy in your cells from food and oxygen creates oxidative stress which needs to be dealt with. And your body does a lot of this damage control during your sleep.

In fact, even Chinese medicine practitioners knew about this thousands of years ago, and recognized the importance of good sleep.

They didn't have a word for "anti-oxidants" so they called it the "lung meridian" and, of course, your lungs involve oxygen. This meridian is most active at 3-5am. So it does co-inside with the times when we are should be in deep sleep.

One of the things that our body uses to determine "when" to sleep, is the level of light in our surroundings.

If the light is bright, like sunlight, its not time to sleep yet. As light gets lower and dimmer, our bodies start to get ready for sleep.

Unfortunately, many of us are looking at a computer, phone or tablet screen just before we sleep, and guess what, those screens are calibrated to be bright just like sunlight -- good for seeing things but a definite disadvantage when we are trying to get to sleep.

I am guilty of this sometimes myself as I love reading and learning, and I use my tablet to read books. So what can we do about it?

Apart from using the tips I mentioned in my previous article on sleep, I have recently started using a good software that helps get me higher quality sleep.

It works by automatically dimming and changing the light quality of your screen according to the time of day. It is free, and it works on all operating systems, as well as iOS.

It is called "f.lux" and you can find it here. Try it out and have some sweet dream!

Coach Jonathan Wong has a Doctorate of Science in Holistic Medicine and is the author of "The Happy Body - Getting to the root of YOUR fitness, health and productivity". He is also the founder and CEO of Genesis Gym Singapore (tm), which aims to provide the best personal training and fitness services in Singapore. The views expressed are his own.