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Comment by YuriNiyazov | Hacker News Reader

I attempted some of the things that you talk about here: tracking sleep + bright overhanging light + sunrise alarm clock. None of it helped, and I didn't want to continue spending even more money on "things" - I attempted a more drastic solution. I changed apartments and made sure to get a room where the windows face east.

I started waking up with the sun every day. It's still a bit of a problem on cloudy days, but it feels a more natural way to function than all the gadgets.

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When I apartment search, I spend a lot of effort trying to understand how light will hit the windows at night, in the morning, what sort of sound will be around, etc.

In the perfect setting, there is darkness outside at night and lots of natural light in the morning. I had that experience at summer camp, where there were no street lights and everyone had to be quiet by a certain time. The mountain air was refreshing and I would be up with the sunrise naturally.

Living in San Francisco, I now know that this utopia is reserved for vacations. In the city, the biggest problem with opening up the blinds is the street light at night. Or the fog gets in the way or I have to get up before the sun rises or the sun doesn't hit my window perfectly during winter months, etc. I set up all these gadgets for all the times I can't get light in the morning naturally, which seems to be 90+% of my life.

I would be much happier to live like I did as an 18 year old at summer camp. I would also be happier if I did yoga everyday, ate organically, exercised everyday, read more than I watched TV, etc. In the meantime...

The apartment that I mentioned is in Berkeley. In San Francisco I slept with open blinds, but with earplugs and an eyecover. Something interesting about eyecovers - they are very good to help you to go to sleep, but they usually move off your face at night, so in the morning they don't prevent the sunlight from you waking you up.

timer + servo motor connected to blinds pull?

I keep imagining a nighttime bedroom temperature control based on a PID and a servo attached to my window-- would probably be too loud (esp with the required torque) to work while I'm sleeping, but a guy can dream, right? Maybe with some louvers...

...would probably be too loud (esp with the required torque)...

Maybe not. What if the window opened over a period of 2-3 minutes? You would also have a more stable system.

perhaps with a very high gear ratio?

it turns out there is a whole market segment for motorized blinds-- but all quite pricey and mostly focused on industrial applications.

How much would people pay for a low-cost kit to work with existing blinds? Will add these to my consumer products idea list the next time I meet with my product-development/manufacturing friends...

I'm curious why a simple alarm clock that wakes you up at the desired hour wasn't sufficient?

For the same reason that the OP had to write a long and well researched post, along with relatively significant financial expense. My body likes sleep, and for me, "willpower to get out of bed" isn't something that magically occurs at 8am. There are studies that associate willpower and self-control with blood sugar levels, exercise, and other factors, and I'm under the impression that people that naturally wake up in a dark room simply from the sound of an alarm clock have widely differing body chemistry from mine.

Interesting. I sometimes have trouble waking up in a dark room as well, but I've found that increasing the volume of the alarm clock and the distance I have to travel to get to it normally solves that problem.

I am abnormally lazy in that respect. I've been known to get up, walk across the room, turn off the alarm clock, walk back to bed, sit down, think "hmm, 5 more minutes would be great" and then go back to sleep, responsibilities be damned.

My first job out of college was a start-up in the financial industry; strolling in at 11am was highly looked down upon, and so ended my budding career as a finance whore.

I find that, for the first few seconds or minutes after waking up, I'm not even capable of rationalising that I'd rather get up and deal with the consequences of being tired. This is far longer than the time it actually takes me to fall back asleep.

I cured myself of that by getting a radio alarm and turning it up as loud as it would go; I basically shocked myself totally awake first thing. Nowadays just an ordinary alarm is enough because I have made it a habit to get up. (If you are not going to get up when the alarm goes off, don't set it - you will just be training yourself in the bad habit of ignoring it.)

Added: One of my responsibilities was to make sure my brothers got up in time for school. I can tell you from experience, that if you have someone to help, ice water is a great motivator to get out of bed.

distance to the alarm clock has no impact on my ability (or rather, lack thereof) to get up in the morning. I will walk through two rooms, turn off the clock (apparently I'm cogent enough in the morning to figure out that snooze means another infernal buzzing sound in 15 minutes, so I turn the alarm off instead), slouch on the couch, and pass out again. It can be so bad that I will dream about getting up again and going to work, only to wake up half an hour after my necessary leave-home-for-work time

hehe, same here. I actually managed to answer a phone call from a colleague trying to wake me up, tell him that i'm on a bus heading there and go back to sleep. Fast forward a couple of hours, I woke up not remembering that at all.

He was mad, as he pulled a double shift because of that, but hey...beauty sleep :D

Personally? I turn it off (and don't remember doing so) or snooze it repeatedly for several hours (also not remembering I've done so). It's especially prominent when I don't get enough sleep (3-4 hours). I'll end up having to redo two classes (both 8am) because I've slept through tests, and it's not because I forgot about the test, nor that I didn't have a reliable alarm clock (sometimes 3 separate ones).

This is a problem I used to have too. Moving the alarm clock some place you can't reach it without standing up seems to solve it for the most part.

that sometimes / kinda works for me, but it seems my semi-conscious mind is a crafty devil, and manages to stay mostly-unconscious through even somewhat complicated tasks.

There's also some past health problems I've had which sometimes leaves me really light-headed when I stand up in the morning, so my options upon hitting the alarm are to lose vision and nearly pass out, or hurry to lay back down.

Also, keep in mind that due to the strange sleep schedule, 8am classes commonly mean I get less than 5 hours of sleep. Try getting 3-4 hours of sleep per night (or less, if I've had a project) for a week, and see how well you wake up to your alarm clock. Now sleep in on the weekend to try to make up for the deficit, and continue this for a few years. Alarm clocks just don't cut it.

For me, at least, waking up by using the sun as an alarm clock feels good. I wake much more alert than if I wake up in a dim room with a blaring alarm clock.

Waking up with the sun is a slow process, whereas an audible alarm is abrupt.

The trouble isn't so much waking up as it is falling asleep. If I try to go to bed at the same time every night, after a few of days I'll find myself staring at the ceiling for hours before I'm able to nod off. That leaves me with like four hours of sleep before the alarm goes off. That's simply not enough for me to be able to function at a reasonable level. So I end up turning off the alarm and collapsing back into bed for another hour or two. This pattern repeats and I end up in free-running sleep mode.

It's not waking up that's hard; the problem is getting to sleep. The symptoms in the article definitely apply to me (and I'm working on resolving them).

Yesterday I woke up much earlier than I'd like (via alarm clock) in the hope of being tired enough to get to sleep before midnight last night. I struggled to concentrate and keep my eyes focused all day, but I was still awake until 3am.

I hate spending 12 hours in bed and get up feeling like I've had 6 hours of actual sleep. It's hard to understand if you don't have this problem yourself.

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