“What?! Where am I? Who am I?”
At the first sound of my iphone’s sarcastic sounding alarm (I’ve come to loathe that treacle chiming noise) every morning, this’s often the first string of internal inquiries I have for myself. That hateful clanging wakes me into a world of confusion I’m reluctant to rejoin. Here, I should be fully rebooted and ready to kick life’s azz anew. Yet, there I lay, mentally paralyzed – beleaguered and bewildered – when it’s barely 5 A.M. However, science says that therein may lay my specific predicament: my pre dawn o’ clock wakeups.
We’ve already established in previous pieces how an audible assault every A.M.’s wholly unhelpful for making us refreshed. (’cause alarms interrupt your sleep cycle.) However, there’s more to it than meets the half-open eye. For example, if you’re someone like myself who rises prior to our fiery sky ball itself, then you may find yourself facing a wakefulness barrier. Even if you got your 7 – 8 hours in. In a way, it’s kinda the same issue you deal with when you try to be productive late at night. Because your melatonin levels start go up as the sun goes down, you (or most of us, at least) get sorta sleepy for all those hours we’re sans solar illumination. Minus the blue light of day, our bodies believe it’s sleep time. So things like getting work done after dusk or in the uber early hours’s often a less than successful plan. Somatically speaking, that’s nap time.
The thing is – that former fact (the failure behind tryn’a nocturnally work) may be challenging to try and battle. Sure, you can drink coffee and expose yourself to blue light, but then you’ll just have trouble zonking out when you wanna later. However, the latter concept (the failure of an early wake up) may just have a workaround:
Meet the dawn simulating alarm clock:
Also operating on blue light technology, you set this thing to start illuminating your room about an hour or so before you’d like to rise and shine along with it. Technically, this thing’s nada new. People’ve been using some form of this to treat Seasonal Affected Disorder (aptly acronym’d as SAD) for some time. (I myself thought about picking up one to cure my own winter induce Eeyore-ism. But then I remembered I was too poor. And that just made me even more depressed.) Thing is, a lotta people suffering from snowflake weather sadness might really be dealing with disturbed sleep – exacerbated by the shortening of the days (and, of course, lack of daylight).
Add in the stress of work and responsibilities and the last thing people wanna do is add in another one.
“Gotta knock tanning under a non-tanning lamp off the list! Right after cooking supper!
And paying bills!
And putting my head in this oven!”
If it’s constructed as a clock to gently nudge your noggin outta downtime, though, then that’s a whole ‘nother story. The fake rays gently bait your brain into wakefulness. Physiologically, you believe a natural dawn has broken. And that way your sleep doesn’t have to be. You spend that hour or two slowly emerging from your subconsciousness’ domain and, hence, ready for the day by the time your eyes open.
And fear not if the price of SAD lights depress you too, ’cause they’ve depressed the cost recently. In fact, you can nab one’a these badboys for a mere $70 on Amazon. Sure, it’s still slightly steep – but who can put a price on rising rejuvenated? Thus, I think I’ll treat myself to one anyway. ’cause the way I see it is this: if I buy it, I’ll wake up faster at 4 A.M. (versus languishing in bed), which means I’ll start working earlier, and boom.
It’ll pay itself off the second it starts lighting a faux coronal fire under my rump at a too-punctual hour.
I feel less depressed and more refreshed already.