Kill the Alarm Clock (2017)
supermemo.guru
supermemo.guru
I'd focus more on actually getting the necessary sleep, and also in not using caffeine regularly. In a new job where coffee was free, I started noticing that I was very drowsy on the evenings after lunch, and also happened in the weekend mornings. Turns out I was drinking a minimum of two coffees in the morning and my body had become used to having that caffeine, and without it I didn't work properly. I fully removed coffee from my diet and after a few weeks I returned to normal. If you are one of those people that "can't function without coffee", try removing it completely and see what happens.
Its the only superpower I actually want - to be able to just turn myself off like lightswitch. My brain itself is fairly happy just sort of thinking about compilers or field theory and stuff like that when going to sleep but I physically cannot stop myself from putting my fingers in yet another pie when I'm awake so I end up in this hyperfocused state in bursts of an hour or two and then I won't be going to bed possibly ever.
Sometimes I'm completely fine, sometimes the only way I'm getting up before 12AM is if I haven't slept a second. Even more annoying is that I have no vices other than tea - ADHD has been bandied around at me in the past, could be something like that.
It is worth getting yourself checked.
I'd also recommend listening to the podcast of prof of Neurobiology Andrew Huberman. He does research on the relationship between the eyes and the brain and a lot of it touches on sleep.
It's so much good information in one place and the guy does such a good job of explaining things that I'm really happy to see it gain traction :)
1. Making and keeping the necessary appointments.
2. Dealing with insurance.
3. Persuading your parents to endure the ego-threat of listening to your actual needs instead of telling you things like "stop being so hard on yourself".
From the article: “ Dr Robert Stickgold has shown that people who learn a skill during the day do not show significant improvement until they get 7-8 hours of good sleep[1]”
Wow, I have had that a handful of nights in the past 3 years.
It's a constant battle to refocus on critical business objectives and not to get distracted by the hundred other interesting rabbit holes.
I know I've given too much time and too much of myself to work, but still feel a bit of shame and stress about falling behind.
I've always heard the advice to do work by discipline and not motivation but 30 years and I haven't figured it out yet :)
Usually the only thing that helps is progress but we shall see!
That said, you might have done constraints enforcing this bizarre schedule. It doesn't really make sense to me without more details.
My sleep cycle drifts naturally forward, and it has lead to many weird issues. I don't fit in a 9-5, at least not without feeling like shit for 80% of the day, being basically useless during the 9-5 portion.
I'm happiest when I just let it happen, and accept that for some portion of the time I am essentially a night-shift worker. But I'm not totally satisfied with that, either. I would love to be up at 9am and down at 1am every day, I think that's the sweet spot. But inevitably 1am becomes 2am, 3am, 4am, 5am, and at about 7am I will just stay up for 24 hours and start all over. This happens over the course of a month or so.
I will try and dig it out, apparently it is more common than you’d think.
That's exactly my case. It's like having a 25 hours cycle instead of 24.
It's currently 6am and I just got up. It really does a number on me, but without that 'grounding' into reality my sleep goes into a 30 hour cycle
I can't remember if it actually helped that much, and I've since gone back to normal alarms.
Yeah I used to use coffee when I was in school, however there are side effects. Some including not allowing me to think clearly. I found out sleeping is the best remedy. Work should allow workers to take naps!
Edit: of course I don't mean jobs that involves heavy machineries. But more like white collar jobs.
The moment I put an interesting thing to do right after I woke up (martial arts training) my internal clock started going the other way. If I don’t intentionally stay up late, my clock will drift and I would get up earlier and earlier ... its weird and fascinating at the same time.
I haven't used an alarm in years and I wake up between 5 and 7 am. At that point, I simply can't sleep any longer, even if I lie in bed, so I get up.
I usually go to bed between 10 and 11 pm.
Also, look up sleep debt. It's exactly what the words suggest. Until you "pay" that debt, you tend to sleep later, because the body wants to catch up on that debt.
Some colleagues are the complete opposite and start to become tired after noon. It's weird how people are different when they aren't forced to all start at the same time. Forcing someone to be awake should be a human rights violation and illegal.
Here’s Caffeine: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Caffeine
Another factor is not having to leave and arrive in the dark. I get to experience sunlight now.
In order to make it to my first (8:30AM) meeting of the day, I needed to wake up at 5:30AM, leave my home at 6:00AM, and white knuckle it down three interstate highways dealing with Bay Area Rush Hour traffic every day. Now, I can usually roll out of bed around 7:30AM and putz around the house a bit, eat a real breakfast, make sure my kid's school/day is squared away, maybe do some exercise, then unhurriedly sit down at the videoconference for my first meeting. Night and day lifestyle change.
People would call me at 8am because something was broken etc.
Things that helped more were:
- Self-employment, because people have to ask for my time at least one day in advance.
- Working international, because people in other timezones know you aren't awake.
- Doing technical writing instead of software development, because it's less time critical and texts don't tend to break suddendly.
I don't set an alarm most days. Usually is I have a meeting at 9am or earlier I will "just in case." (I'm usually up earlier.) And if I have something critical--like an early plane when I was traveling (which they mostly were)--I'd even set two alarms.
If you work two low-paid jobs, you are time poor. My partner used to work three jobs at one point in her life, getting up at 5am, and finishing at 11pm. An alarm clock is needed due to sleep deprivation.
Perhaps a different framing is "kill low-wage jobs"? I'm being facetious but alarm clocks are not inherently bad, low-wages and long hours are.
My main point about this article is that it's not considering why we are roped into an alarm clock culture - it's not because we want to be woken up this way, it's because sometimes it's an economic necessity.
Besides, the way the regulatory system works now, new regulations only seem to benefit large corporations who can afford to lobby and get around the regulations. They actively hurt small businesses.
Minimum wage increases?
Why not increase the minimum wage to $10,000 an hour?
Minimum wage and employee protection laws are the way forward. Everybody should be able to live comfortably, working at most 40 hours / week.
Minimum wage is bad in its own way, because it sets a "what is the least we can get away with" boundary for employers, but in the current employment climate, employers can and do get away with paying less (see the service industry where employees are expected to collect tips to stipend their wages, see the gig industry where the employer doesn't give a shit that the employee has to struggle full days to get enough work to get paid).
What if they aren’t productive enough to earn that amount of money? Where does the money come from?
You have millions of people sitting in their government provided housing, waiting for their government provided payouts, so they can avoid having to get out and work. This sound familiar yet? Then what you have to do, after production grounds to a halt, is to start to force people to work which is exactly how you get labor camps.
I'm pretty sure you may be trolling but if you're not, reading up on the western european welfare states would probably be a good idea.
At least in the UK, we have an inordinate amount of benefits cheats that live off other people's money. If you only extend benefits to people who physically cannot work -i.e. disability benefits, then you stop this happening.
...
> perceptions among the British public were that benefit fraud was high – on average people thought that 27% of the British welfare budget is claimed fraudulently; however, official UK Government figures have stated that the proportion of fraud stands at 0.7% of the total welfare budget in 2011/12
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_fraud_in_the_United_...
> Fraud: Cases where all three of the following conditions apply:
The conditions for receipt of benefit, or the rate of benefit in payment, are not being met
The claimant can reasonably be expected to be aware of the effect on entitlement
Benefit stops or reduces as a result of the review. [1] <
Firstly, the data is only from those who got caught. I would say there is probably a lot more that haven't been. Also, you can claim benefits by going to the job centre every so often, but you don't need to actually get a job.
Anecdotally, my mate's dad does this. He has been living off of benefits for 10+ years, even though he is more than able to work. If someone can get away with it for that long, how is the system not broken?
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/fraud-and-error-in-...
You can definitely manufacture an umbrella or a car cheaper in China or Serbia than in the U.S.
This means that there is a natural ceiling on wages in some sectors, unless people start "Buy American" even if the price of the product is considerably higher. Which, in turn, will lower their own purchasing power.
As seen in practice, most customers would rather purchase cheaper stuff made abroad by cheaper workforce. The E.U. has a lot of protective measures in various sectors precisely because they know that the same would happen if the restrictions were lifted.
What happens time and time again if the working class has it too rough in a country with a sizable 'aristocratic' class just below the ruling class?
What do you want to do, keep raising it every year? The market will outrun the government. This kind of thinking is how you end up with a welfare state, where the only way people can live is with their pitiful stimulus check from the government. People want to earn their own money not freeload of other taxpayers whilst sitting on the couch.
I am not going to be that guy that points out a problem and doesn't propose a solution though. The solution is cut back corporation tax and regulation and make it easier for companies to hire people. This of course is what made the west as great as it is today.
I've never understood why people continue to make this argument when there are easily demonstrable counter-examples to the "But you won't be able to afford anything!!!" line of thought.
Look at countries like Switzerland, or even in the US there is Washington DC where minimum wage is $15, and society isn't collapsing.
No society wouldn't collapse with a minimum wage, that is not my argument. Logic would dictate that if everyone in a town was making $15 an hour then prices would naturally increase. How can you not see this?
Yes, I live in Switzerland.
Is it more expensive to go to a restaurant than in America? Yes, sure, but at least the people working there can have a good quality of life and don't rely on tips to pay rent. Prices of things that involve service are higher, true, but wages are good enough here that you can still live really well.
Maybe the average person can't afford to eat out every day of the week, but should they be able to? I feel like this is only possible if you underpay service staff.
Or do you mean to apply this rule only to large, profitable corporations and spare the mom-and-pop shops and other small businesses that are already having trouble staying open?
Low wage jobs are already being replaced by high wage jobs, but not 1:1. There are already higher wage jobs programming the machines that automate away a dozen low wage jobs. I'm guessing that wasn't what you meant by "turn into" though.
Increase minimum wage = no poverty
When in reality, for some people it would be: Increase minimum wage = they get fired and can't find a job, end up homeless.
They don't have to; it should be a factor of the overall company's revenue. If you take an infamous company like Amazon, they have 1.3 million employees worldwide generating 386 billion in revenue; that's nearly $300K per employee of revenue generated. Surely there's room there to pay people more.
Companies rarely exist to give employees more money; their goal is to increase the wealth of their owners.
Good. We should automate away more jobs. More automation means people can work less hours, get more sleep, and pursue things that do not provide direct financial rewards but still enrich society. This is what we should be working towards.
The only problem with that is if the value of that automation only enriches a few people at the top. But that is not an inherent problem. The solution is simple: progressive income and wealth taxes. These can pay for universal basic income and other safety nets that provide for the people whose jobs have been replaced with automation.
And after that what? Continue taxing the highly productive people, while letting those whose jobs were automated away, live the rest of their lives doing nothing?
That's still close to $120,000 per employee, so plenty of room to pay people more.
The next step would be to look at the segmented results, to see whether there is a significant difference in net income per employee across the company (It's fine if a high margin operation inside of Amazon ends up supporting a lower margin operation, but you wouldn't want to build economic policy on the assumption that businesses would do that).
If economic survival requires depletion of your sleep (which is so important), it's highlighting an imbalance in the overall system.
If someone is not highly skilled and works low end jobs, he could be left jobless if minimum wage increases. Some businesses already have low profitability and they can't absorb an increase in minimum wage.
I know where you are getting from but I don't see a simple solution. UBI might help but from my perspective the cost of UBI is too large to pull off in any normal economy (petro states in the gulf can probably pull it off).
Social safety nets is another thing that needs to be improved though. I don't believe in UBI myself, I think (and I'm not an economist) that the cost of living will just go up by an equal amount, negating the whole thing. It seems to work on a small scale, but cost of living is not changed significantly if only a small section of a country receives UBI.
Anyway, back to unemployment, in theory automation causes unemployment too, but in practice, while people lose jobs over automation, the overall unemployment rate is not significantly affected. Or in other words, there's always more work to be done.
If you made this argument 100 years ago I might be inclined to agree with you, but "reasonable" minimum wages (i.e.: a 40h/week job pays always enough to feed a family and a roof over your head) have been tried and tested in countries all over the world and as far as I'm aware, they're almost always a success.
The 'low skill worker' losing job opportunities because of too high minimum wages is a myth that just doesn't hold up to reality, no matter how many times conservatives afraid of losing their own bottom line or relative status repeat it.
If you take it to extreme, it's obvious it's not a myth. Imagine a 100k USD yearly minimum wage. Obviously all unskilled worked wouldn't be able to earn this much for the employed, but in places where you have to have someone do the job, they'd enjoy their new high minimum wage.
A few quotes here:
> Starting pay for the humblest burger-flipper at McDonald’s in Denmark is about $22 an hour once various pay supplements are included.
> Americans might suspect that the Danish safety net encourages laziness. But 79 percent of Danes ages 16 to 64 are in the labor force, five percentage points higher than in the United States.
But very well, let's assume it could work that way. Then you still haven't changed anything about the need for alarm clocks or work at inconvenient hours. So talking about minimum wage is really besides the point here.
Even high paid physicians have to work ungodly hours at times.
I feel this is a neglected aspect of wage discussions. It is normal that people start with lower wage jobs and work their way upwards, but age demographics are rarely reflected in the income distribution charts.
Some work unfortunately needs to be done at ungodly hours, you can not simply kill off those jobs.
Edit: since I can't post replies because of rate limiting. Sorry, but low paid jobs absolutely are stepping stones in many cases. For example people used to start while in school with delivering newspapers ("paper boy"). Many people have side jobs while completing their education. And while you work your three jobs, you can look for better jobs. You should, actually. They are stepping stones in that they help you survive until you find a better job. What jobs are the "work three jobs" variety anyway? I would expect you to be able to replace them with one "normal" job eventually, that is a normal job that pays a normal salary (even if it is a low salary). If that is not enough to sustain your lifestyle, what exactly is going on in your life? Where do the high costs come from?
Maybe the OP could explain why his wife ended up working three jobs, and how she got out of it?
As for ungodly hours, I don't think some people only working night shifts and others only day shifts is an option in general.
Edit 2: how do you find a better job? The traditional way is asking around, checking job portals, considering to move to a place that has job offers, that kind of thing. I guess most of those people also have long commutes, so I wonder how well most job boards are adapted to mobile.
You, and many others, do not understand poverty or living as the working poor, living paycheck to paycheck, etc.
Have a read into the physical and mental effects of poverty, especially on children.
Edit: also poverty is a trap, every thing is more expensive when you're poor.
New people constantly come into this world. They have to find their way in life. Not everything is set out for them right from the beginning.
Yes, everything is more expensive when you are poor. That is why most people strive and work for not being poor.
There are also different attitudes. Some people only have children when they feel they can provide for them (as in prevent them from having to work three jobs), others don't care. I'm not saying that those kids should just be left alone in their poverty, as it obviously isn't their own fault. But at the same time it is not the fault of the more responsible parents and their kids, either. The poor kids were not created by the rich people, they were created by poor people. In my opinion, it is all a bit more complicated than claiming there is so much surplus.
Rich people existing also doesn't mean there exists an unlimited amount of stuff. Jeff Bezos owning a trillion dollars does not imply he could conjure food for a billion people out of thin air. Food still needs to be farmed by somebody, which is a chore.
This is a naive take. It's not a game where if you grind enough you get experience and your level increases. If you're working multiple jobs, I doubt your performance will be good enough to be the first in line for a promotion. You also won't have time and energy for an education that allows you a better job in a different industry. Probably won't even have money to pay for courses, nor to take time off and do something different. Not to mention that those situations are taxing on your body and mental health, putting you in a competitive disadvantage with other employees.
Low wage jobs that don't pay enough to survive are not a stepping stone, they are a trap. It is also a drain on society: these jobs don't allow people to scale up the ladder, so the pool of workers in these jobs gets bigger and bigger, which in turn pushes wages further down.
> Some work unfortunately needs to be done at ungodly hours
The discussion is not about ungodly hours but about getting the necessary amount of sleep. You can work nights for 8h and have a decent sleep schedule. It's not optimal, of course, but it's very different from working two, three jobs and not having time to sleep.
The problem is not alarm clocks, the whole system is broken if you need to work 12+ hours a day just to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.
Edit: I think "get a better job" is a better argument than "I am such a victim, there is nothing I can do, everybody else is at fault". What else than getting a better job can you do? Seriously? And you don't need better education or stuff like that. If you work three jobs, maybe you can replace them with a normal job in a factory line or whatever. Just because you don't immediately get bestowed with your ideal job, doesn't mean that everything is hopeless and society is exploiting you. Most people don't start out with their ideal job.
Jobs don't fall from the sky. And nobody owes you a job. If there are no jobs in your area, you should move to someplace where there are jobs (maybe because a new Amazon warehouse opens or whatever). Yes, there can be circumstances where you can't move, like perhaps having to take care of sick relatives. But those are also temporary.
If this it not possible, the system itself is broken, either rent/food is too expensive, wages are too low or both.
And, what if everyone followed your advice to abandon low wage jobs and just get better ones?
- People need a living wage to, well, live.
- Therefore, all people should get better jobs so that they have living wages (instead of working 3 jobs or relying on welfare)
- As a result, there are no workers for low wage jobs.
- But everyone relies on these jobs constantly for the menial tasks we don’t like to do ourselves (like cooking or cleaning or farming or building things)
- So we do in fact value these jobs enough for people to work them. Otherwise our lives would be less comfortable.
As a result, we should actually be bringing the wages of these jobs up (to make them living-wage jobs) rather having everyone abandon these jobs for other high paying jobs which don’t actually exist.
I want to (eventually) eat out at a restaurant, and there aren’t enough teenagers to be waiters everywhere. So do I just say to every waiter that they should “get a better job”, and eventually run out of waiters? Ridiculous. I propose that if someone cannot make a living off of the service they provide, then we should examine whether we would rather do it ourselves all the time. If we do think it’s a valuable service, I’d hope we’d be willing to compensate in a non-exploitative way.
How about "We should organize ourselves to ensure that everyone's necessities are provided for through democratic processes"?
There is no reason to accept this status quo.
OK, your account was created 13 hours ago and you're already at -19.
I'm both and I can't rely on my natural sleeping patterns to wake me up and get the kids to school/care.
That said, replacing a adrenaline-pumping/panic-inducing alarm clock with something that gradually increases sound or light sounds like best of both worlds. You can still rely on getting woken up when needed, and there's no need to shock yourself to it.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Simulation-Headspace-Subscrip...
The approach that worked for me was:
- Increasing light from warm dim (~100 lumens) to bright white (1000+ lumens) over the course of ~30m. Even though you're not conscious and your eyelids are closed your eyes are still responding to the light and rebooting your circadian rhythm.
- A few minutes after the light reaches the brightest setting, have a sound-based alarm. I have nature sounds that start quiet and get progressively louder over about ten minutes, but I usually wake up after less than a minute.
- Getting into bed at a consistent time (+/-20m) seven and a half hours before the sound-based alarm. This is the hardest part since I rarely feel tired that early (yes, even when I've exercised) and it feels like a waste of time to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. But I know from regular experience that when I wait until I'm tired to get in bed I have an unproductive morning.
If it's gradual enough, you won't just bury your head, and if it's enough bulbs, it'll get bright enough to convince your body it's daytime.
There's another trick I've been meaning to do. The Hue app's wake up routine turns it on to a low temperature light, but turning it a little higher temp/bluer once I'm up does help trick me into daytime. I'm meaning to make a cron job on my raspberry pi to make my own wakeup routine that is a little slower to avoid the need to stagger lights, and also increase temperature once it's bright. If you know linux, the pi is easy.
Even without the fancy pi stuff, it's Good Enough. The Hue bulbs add up fast in cost, but it's worth it to me. I have the white ambiance ones.
- Sunlight - 10,000 to 120,000 lux
- Light Therapy lamp (from 4 inches away) - 10,000 lux
- 60W Philips Hue light bulb (800 lumens, 120deg beam angle, 4in away) - ~25,000 lux
- 60W bulb (same specs, but 5ft away) - ~100lux
Those numbers for the 60W light bulb are also optimistic, and will go down if you put it in a light fixture that doesn't redirect all of the light into a 120deg beam (like a regular standing lamp).
So, either place it ~4"+ from your face, get multiple, or find a brighter 100W+ smart bulb.
Additional anecdata - I've used the Philips sunrise alarm clock before (apparently 300lux), and it tends not to wake me up either.
In other news, if anyone has a 100W+ white color temp changing smart bulb to recommend, I'm all ears.
I think you aren’t including in your calcs that you’re presumably not in a black room. A light colored paint means the light that isn’t going straight to your eyes from the bulb still brightens the room significantly.
Although I checked again recently, and they now sell them with Bluetooth direct, eliminating the cost of the Hub (with limited functionality, but enough for sunrise alarm clock, I think). Still puts you solidly in the 3 fig cost territory...
Cheap ones on Amazon are in the $20 range. Highly recommended. The Philips is more expensive and has just one color, but it seems to be built much more ruggedly.
My alarm clock has a 30 minute pre-alarm (starting very softly with nature noises, never reaching maxing out at 10%), then it starts calm music going from 10% to 80% over 10 minutes. It’s very relaxing to me to wake up like this.
I used to sleep without an alarm clock (work from home and more or less free work starting times) and I usually felt far more tired during the day.
In addition, I used to have trouble falling asleep, now I’m gone 5-10 minutes after I put the book down.
I now usually sleep 6h a night, with once or twice 7.5h (I can tell if my body thinks I need more sleep that night). I’ve often read that 6h is not enough, but ever since I changed it like this, I’m simply far more energized and have no crash during the day.
You can give it a timeframe when you want to wake up so you won't oversleep.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/jvbsuz/looking...
The last thing I want right after waking up, is having adrenaline and cortisol take over my body. It feels about as bad as waking up too early by an alarm clock.
My days are best when I:
- Wake up naturally, without an alarm clock
- Relax the first hour, eat and drink something, talk to family.
If I had to to try to summarize the core, it would be that I've been conditioned through school/society/work over decades that the morning is for fulfilling responsibilities to others. Only when school/work/chores are done, could I exercise any autonomy to do whatever I wanted (seeing friends/playing videogames/programming/night-life/etc..). Naturally, I ended up with at _least_ a moderate pavlovian response to the end of the workday.
The one thing I absolutely couldn't shake was that by the end of my workday, my "fulfilling responsibilities" energy felt completely drained -- leaving me in a cycle of "wake up, immediately go to work, finish work exhausted, veg out on whatever interest my brain has until very late and go to sleep anywhere from 12AM-2AM" with little time to maintain _my_ life up to the standards I set for myself.
I also interpreted threads like this one in the way you do:
> Should I really give that up so I can be more productive at my day job?
No, absolutely not unless that is a personal goal of yours! Maybe this isn't true for you or others, but I _do_ feel recharged in the morning. In a very general sense, there is somewhat of a clean slate mentally in the morning that my wife and I call the "good brain". Anxieties that I fell to sleep with are often resolved, pessimism might be reframed into cautious optimism, that tricky programming (or interpersonal!) problem has had some fog clear out of the way, etc...
This led me to realize that my sleep schedule _was already_ optimized for my employer's benefit. Get out of bed, and take that fresh "good brain" to work and drain it. The way out of this for me was to slowly transition into earlier mornings to get a few hours of orientation in the morning where I can use my fresh energy to do something valuable _for me_ instead of the company I am working for.
Nowadays I'm up at 4-5AM without an alarm clock which leaves me 2-4 hours to get ready and do the things I feel I need to do. The head-start feels really nice.
A couple of years ago I inherited my Grandparents clockwork pendulum clock which ticks quite loudly and also chimes the hours and a single chime on the half hour.
I still have an alarm set on my phone just in case, but after a couple of months I found myself consistently aware that I've woken up naturally before my alarm has had a chance to go off. And as I'm not shocked awake by the alarm I'm feeling a lot better on a morning because of it.
I can only assume that I'm subconsciously aware of the time passing and what time it is from the chiming, rather than a period of obliviousness and then a sudden shock. If I forget to wind it so it stops I tend to sleep in late and get woken by the alarm.
I do find it slightly surprising as I used to be one of those people where a ticking wristwatch wrapped in a sock in the bottom of a draw on the other side of the house would keep me awake when I was younger. Having the wall clock audibly ticking across the house has actually become quite calming and soporific.
I do wake with my puppy which according to the article is not “natural” but I don’t think it’s anything like waking to an alarm. We both wake gradually, have a little snuggle, say good morning and then start our day.
I also drink coffee through the morning and I object to the article putting that down. I don’t drink it for its stimulating effect, if anything it’s calming (then again I have ADHD and take amphetamines which are also calming).
Anyway, I will say to anyone who has the option, do try going without the alarm and adjusting your sleep schedule accordingly. It’s absolutely a more refreshing way to wake up.
My sleep quality varies greatly, and the alarm has almost nothing to do with it. I always set it for 8 hours past my bedtime, and often wake up an hour or two before it rings (like this morning. I have been up since 4). If I need to get up early, I hit the sack early.
It actually seems to have more to do with my mental activity. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been engaged in a fairly Brobdingnagian server refactoring job. It’s been intense, and I have been waking up early, quite frequently. I suspect that I’ll improve, once I get back to working on the app.
The premise is simple but effective -- it senses whether you're in deep or shallow sleep, and rings the alarm within a 30 minute window before your set wake-up time.
First few times I used it, it blew my mind. Effectively, it nudges you awake when you're almost awake anyway. It's so gentle. I'll never go back to a hard-set alarm clock.
+1 to not using an alarm clock. I trust the years of evolution that the human body has tuned in figuring out how much to sleep.
Some things can only be done when there is sunlight or when businesses are open.
Best decision.
http://super-memory.com/articles/sleep2000.htm#Alarm%20clock
I don't think that is sustainable.
For a start I don't actually want to sleep that much. Nor do I think I could.
Humans live in all kinds of environments that are far removed from the East African Rift.