Apps

How to get a good night’s sleep

Five tips that don’t involve melatonin

Published

April 1, 2021

Chay Lazaro

Getting a good night’s sleep is essential to staying healthy. Not only does it allow your body to rest, it’s also the time for your body to perform some essential maintenance on your memory, hormones, immune system, and other critical functions. Sleep also helps the brain’s ability to learn, help the body fight infection, and even lower blood pressure.

If you are looking to improve your sleep habits, it might be counterintuitive to look to your smartphone for help. Keeping electronics away before bed is always a good place to start, but there are a lot of tools and features on the iPhone that can get you to sleep better.

Track your sleep

Built into the Apple Watch and the Health app on the iPhone, using the Sleep app is a good way to start tracking your sleep. Sleep tracking will make sleep a priority alongside exercise and eating healthier.

Tracking your sleep can give you an overview of your sleeping patterns so you can make adjustments where necessary. Going to sleep one hour earlier or later can sometimes make you feel more well-rested.

The Apple Watch uses signals from the accelerometer to determine when you’re awake and when you’re asleep, so you can track how long you’re asleep each night and view your sleep trends over time.

Other sleep tracking apps you can try are Sleep Cycle – Sleep Tracker, Autosleep, Sleeptown, Snorelab.

Create a bedtime routine

Using the Wind Down feature on the Sleep app, you can create a customized bedtime routine. You can create a shortcut that includes etting up a specific scene in the Home app, listening to a soothing soundscape on Apple Music, or using a favorite meditation app before you fall asleep.

You can also set a schedule for time away from your iPhone screen using Downtime. This can help put a stop to doom scrolling your social media feeds past your bed time.

Other apps like Fabulous – Daily Self Care, and Mindvalley: Learn and Evolve can help you build habits, create routines for self care that result in better sleep.

Winding down can also be done by anchoring offline activities to bedtime. Changing into comfy pyjamas, doing your nighttime skincare routine, dimming the lights, diffusing lavender oil, journaling, or reading a few pages of a book can help your body know it’s time for sleep.

READ: How you can use your smartwatch to be healthier

Listen to ambient sounds

It’s not just your body that needs to relax before bed; the mind needs to calm down, too.

Meditation and breathing mindfully can help prepare the mind for sleep. Apps like Headspace, Calm, Relax Melodies: Sleep Sounds, and Breethe: Meditation & Sleep have guided exercises to help you drift off at night.

Sleep-associated content consumption on Apple Music has been up since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Apple Music has a dedicated space entirely devoted to helping people unwind, relax and fall asleep. On the app you can find curated mood and activity playlists, nature sounds and white noise, radio stations and more.

The top playlists on Apple Music for relaxation and sleep include: Sleep Sounds, Piano Chill, Bedtime Beats, In My Room, Today’s Easy Hits, Acoustic Hits, Today’s Chill, Pure Focus, Piano Chill.

READ: 8 mindfulness apps to help you cope in this time of uncertainty

Try LumiHealth

In Singapore, the LumiHealth app is also helping to look after your sleep. Users can earn rewards of up to SG$380 with challenges that remind users to stick to a sleep routine, wind down before bedtime, or meditate for a good night’s sleep.

Apps

ChatGPT will soon allow NSFW conversations

The platform will start age-gating users in December.

Published

October 16, 2025

Luigi Leonardo

Every day, we inch closer and closer to the strange reality of Joaquin Phoenix’s Her. Today’s AI-powered chatbots have inevitably adapted to address our more carnal desires. Some, such as those offered by xAI, are even explicitly designed to only flirt with the user. Soon, ChatGPT will offer the same thing: a way for adult users to… well, be adults.

Through a post on X, OpenAI’s Sam Altman reiterated ChatGPT’s impending drive to introduce age-gating in December. Keeping younger users from the platform will open ChatGPT to more “mature” conversations. Altman specifically names “erotica” as one of the potential uses of a looser platform.

We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.

Now that we have…

— Sam Altman (@sama) October 14, 2025

Additionally, ChatGPT is rolling out an update which will make the platform more personable and comparable to actual conversations. This includes using more emojis or talking like a friend.

The platform is also adding more safeguards when it comes to mental health issues, given that more people are using it as a makeshift therapist. Recently, Altman made sure that ChatGPT treated mental health with more delicateness. To some, especially those without such issues, the platform became more unusable. To bring back how it used to be, the platform will add better tools to detect whether the user is in “mental distress.”

Finally, OpenAI is implementing a backend solution to mental health by creating a new council of researchers and experts to accurately determine the impact of AI on mental health. Currently, it’s still unknown how much this new technology is helping (or harming) our wellbeing.

Apps

YouTube is getting a redesign

The update looks a bit like Liquid Glass.

Published

October 15, 2025

Luigi Leonardo

What’s your favorite YouTube design? I still hold a bit of nostalgia for the silver era, but the practicality of the current minimalist design is remarkable. Now, it’s time for a change. YouTube is refreshing its design starting this week.

Much like Apple with Liquid Glass, YouTube is going for a more transparent approach. The new design lets more content through the interface. It also features rounder buttons, in contrast to today’s blockier features.

The comments section is also getting a bit of an upgrade to allow for more structure between original posts and replies.

For engagement with actual videos, some videos will now have custom like animations. The update gives an example of a music video which puts out a musical note when liked. Adding a video to a custom playlist or the Watch Later list is also more natural.

YouTube is rolling out these updates starting this week. It will also be available for web, mobile, and TV users.

Apps

ChatGPT Go now available in the Philippines, more Asian countries

Access to more popular ChatGPT features for an affordable subscription plan

Published

October 9, 2025

GadgetMatch

Graphics by Vincenz Lee | GadgetMatch

OpenAI has officially launched ChatGPT Go in 16 Asian countries, including the Philippines. This is the most cost-friendly subscription option yet at just PhP 300 (~ US$ 5.15).

This development gives users in the serviced regions greater access to ChatGPT’s advanced capabilities at a more affordable price.

To get started, simply visit chat.openai.com or download the ChatGPT mobile app, then create an account and select ChatGPT Go as your plan. The payment process is simple.

On the other hand, those who already have accounts may simply upgrade to Go.

The launch comes amid strong growth adoption of OpenAI’s tools in the Philippines. In fact, the country ranks among the top five countries for weekly ChatGPT users in Asia.

In addition, the top five use cases locally are tutoring, editing, personal writing, “how to” advice, and creative ideation.

At PhP 300 a month, ChatGPT Go subscribers will gain access to ChatGPT’s most popular features, including higher message limits, image generation, file uploads, and memory.

These are all powered by GPT-5, OpenAI’s most-advanced model.

Specifically, here’s the perks for the Go plan compared to free:

10x higher message limits
10x more image generations per day
10x more file or image uploads per day
2x longer memory for personalized responses

ChatGPT Go will join existing subscription options Plus (PhP 1,100) and Pro (PhP 9,900).

Plus is for subscribers who need more advanced thinking models and features like deep research, agent mode, and Sora video creation.

Meanwhile, Pro is for professionals, researchers, or organizations who need enterprise-grade scale, pro-level reasoning, and the most advanced features.