If you can get an alarm that's loud enough to be genuinely unpleasant to other people within earshot, and put it out of reach from the bed, that should rocket you out of bed fairly reliably. Ideally, it starts quiet and gets louder so you can get to it before it's annoying.
Having a five year old who follow any alarm with much louder noises of his own works.
When I get up and run a few miles before doing anything else, I also feel more alert and generally great. Still doesn't happen much.
1: my roommate has an alarm like this. She keeps the clock in the bathroom, and frequently (once every couple of weeks) forgets to turn it off for some reason. I can't hear it at all until it has gotten to EXTREMELY VERY LOUD and then only if I happen to pass through the upstairs hallway with hearing aids on, but the cats, and presumably the neighbors, go crazy. Poor cats. Poor neighbors.
1: Let me introduce you to Tocky.
It's an alarm clock that will jump from your night stand and start swiftly rolling and turning away. The only way to get Tocky to stop is to get out from under the covers and chase this cute little guy down as he tries to evade you.
A cat expecting a scheduled feeding is very persistent. I had no idea I could be woken with a stare.
I loved early morning rowing in college. Somehow, getting up at ten to five was so unreasonable that I didn't have the "I don't want to get out of bed" reaction. Alarm went off, I sleepwalked into my clothes and onto the bus, got into the boat and obeyed orders, and became fully conscious around quarter to six, halfway through practice. And then I was perky and alert for the rest of the day, until I collapsed midsentence at ten to nine.
1, 2, and 3 suggest that the best remedy would be to give birth to a very nimble child with excellent cardiovascular fitness.
6: We had friends catsit for my childhood cat when we went on vacation once. When we got back "We had no idea you fed him so early, but he woke us up at his usual feeding time." He'd managed to get them out bed before five, a time at which he'd never been fed in his life before.
An ex girlfriend had this 'biorhythm'* alarm clock that seemed quite effective. It made non-regular noises on some sort of cycle and gradually got more obtrusive. It did seem to gradually rouse you from sleep over a few minutes.
* how it was billed, I'm not endorsing the claim.
1, 2, and 3 suggest that the best remedy would be to give birth to a very nimble child with excellent cardiovascular fitness
In terms of ensuring alertness and bright-eyedness in the mornings, this is pretty much the definition of "short term gain, long term pain".
This morning's totally unexpected and totally welcome greeting after my alarm was "Daddy, what if I get my own breakfast and you sleep a little longer?".
Sure, if you had been up you would have suggested something other than Scotch for breakfast, but the extra sleep was awfully nice.
My wife does the multi-snooze (set before I generally get up). My preferred routine is to read a short story or chapter in a book before getting up*. Makes it seem like I'm not getting up just to work.
*I just started A Game of Thrones and it is set up quite well for that plan (and boy does the TV series just fall right out of that structure as well). Two of the mini-chapters this morning.
13: That would have had me running out of bed faster than anything that didn't involve a fire.
Despite having heard the advice time and again that those extra ten or fifteen minutes are actually going to leave me groggier, I still do it and practically everyday.
I'm not too bad with the snooze button in particular but little things like this are how I try to remind myself to understand addiction: you can actually experience the net loss of things and be unable to stop doing them, unable to remember a very short time later that it wasn't worth it. (For me, I guess, the main one is staying up past midnight during the week.)
13: You're lucky. Newt didn't even ask.
Has anyone tried one of those dawn simulator thingies? They seem like the might suck less than an alarm. No matter how much sleep I get, I will probably feel terrible if I've been awakened by an alarm.
I snooze mostly when I'm sick, and it winds up being 30-40 minutes that I really needed.
I solve this problem by getting to work late. Don't even need an alarm!
My dawn simulator helps a lot in the winter.
Moby, I still have the radio and then the beeper go off.
I have a Red Dawn simulator. At 6.30 every morning it screams "WOLVERINES!" in my ear. If I hit the snooze button, it machineguns my bedside table.
Despite having heard the advice time and again that those extra ten or fifteen minutes are actually going to leave me groggier, I still do it and practically everyday.
Is this advice backed by any studies? Because if it's true, I really should change my waking habits. Well, I should anyway. It's become ridiculous. I now have a series of alarms, the first of which goes off a good 40 minutes before I usually get up for good.
My nephew and brother made lunch one day for themselves [unauthorised]. Aged about 7-ish. Cheese on toast, they thought.
So, they managed to slice the cheese, butter the bread, turn on the grill, get the bread and cheese under the grill, even managed to get the cheese nice and bubbly. All good.
Then they remembered they hadn't toasted the other side of the bread, so, little geniuses that they were, they just flipped it over.
When I get up in the morning is a continual struggle between the part of my brain that thinks I should get to work at a responsible hour (before 9:30, say), and the part of my brain that knows that nobody will even bat an eye if i don't show up until 11. When I've had actual constraints at work (like a 9:30am standup meeting five days a week), it hasn't been difficult to get there on time.
So apparently I just need some more external constraints in my life.
I am about to go into work now, but I had food poisoning last night and needed to get rehydrated. Boss was okay with that. I could stay home, but I have a client that I need to catch.
27: a friend of mine once, when he was young, tried to make himself mashed potatoes. He obtained potatoes and a potato masher and managed, after 20 minutes sustained effort, to mash some potatoes. He then boiled the result and was left with, essentially, potato porridge. He couldn't work out how his mum had managed to cook them so much faster and with such a superior result.
Little genius that he is, he did this at the age of 19.
I have an alarm clock that I really like. It's a Logitech Squeezebox similar to this one (I couldn't find the precise model). It does all this fancy stuff with synching to the music library on your computer, but that's all for my husband's benefit. I just like that it has a series of non screechy noises to wake you up that start soft and get louder. The tune today sounded like tribal beats.
I am miserable when woken by an alarm, extra miserable when it's my partner's alarm and she then hits snooze and keeps waking me. So now it's my job to wake up at a predetermined time and to wake her. It's still annoying when she's getting up before I am and chooses to snooze and I have to nudge her every ten or fifteen minutes, but it's better than making me start my day livid.
What 32 said. How can you snoozers live with othersyourselves?
32: I find my wife's snooze only half wakes me (if at all) and then I contentedly drift back off knowing it's not for me. This skill was honed in my early twenties when a roommate had an extremely early-morning delivery job but as a substitute so he'd generally get a 3:30 AM call to tell him where to go that day.
I'd be really pleased if my iphone alarm could be set to use music I have on the phone (I could wake up to the dawn duet from Gotterdammerung!!!) (!!!) but I've only found one program that does this and it requires your phone to stay on and, whatever, "awake" I guess, all night, so I deleted it immediately.
35: Have you looked into Awaken? I don't know if that's the program you used but I used to use it with my desktop Mac and I liked it (though it did have to be in sleep mode and wouldn't work from a fully off computer).
Snooze: I never do this and it really annoys me that one person I sleep next to is always all "mmnnf, 'nother five minutes" for the next hour or so.
That Tocky thing is brilliant but evil. ISTR seeing video of it when it was an MIT student project.
Also, Gearlog sez you might record yourself threatening that you'll be fired as an alarm tone.
You don't need to be Bob McManus to find that a truly perverse degree of submission to capitalist values. It's not enough to be reminded of it; you have to pretend it's you even though, ex hypothesi, you don't actually have that kind of discipline without it. Vomit.
Recording your boss making the threat would be a very different idea. Now there's one to change your life.
I am still in the pattern, since I went on Atkins in April, of passing out at 10 and waking up alert at 3-4 AM. It has fucking killed my bedtime movie and several times I've slept with the electronics on. Lights and sounds used to another sleepkiller, now I have slept thru thunderstorms. I catnap or powernap during the day, maybe another hour total.
I used to have a lot of trouble falling asleep, and would sleep longer, and wake up groggy. I would deliberately load up on carbs & drugs (vicoden, ativan, valium, anti-histamines) at bedtime in order to relax, a big source of my weight gain. I do miss that fullbelly tryptophan bliss.
down 37 pounds since april. I tried to limit myself to 5 lbs in July, just couldn't hack it, did 7. I need to go get a big Coke now. Maybe later.
Hit the dumbbells for an hour. Feels fucking great. I should have followed with lunch, a couple eggs and lettuce, but no appetite.
I fucking hate getting up in the mornings and the only way I can do it is just to wake straight up. Snooze only prolongs the agony. I do actually really like JP's wake up and read method - makes it feel like 10 minutes of luxury lying in bed rather than the torment of having to get up. I should start setting my alarm a bit earlier again.
Kid A has this alarm clock, the Sonic Bomb. She doesn't use the under-mattress vibrating pad any more, because that makes the clock near enough to her bed that she could hang out of it (she has one of those beds up a ladder), turn it to snooze, or just off, and go back to sleep. This ended up getting us a letter from social services about her lateness to school. So now it is over the other side of the room, and she has to climb down the ladder and walk over to turn it off, and she stays up. She said that just getting up has turned out to be much easier than she thought it would be.
My cellphone keeps track of when I want to get up, tells me 9 hours earlier than that that perhaps I should go to sleep, and uses the accelerometer to set off the alarm sometime 20 minutes before I have to get up when I'm already turning over or flailing someway. Yes, yes. Also, silly puzzle to turn off the alarm, to make sure I'm really awake. Is less nausea-inducing than an alarm from deep sleep.
41: Wow.
I have a really hard time forcing myself to go to bed early. I seem to have a 25-hour cycle; when left to my own devices, I stay up an hour later every night.
Jeepers. I'm a snooze alarm person, but the alarm is just the clock radio, set to the local public radio station just when it's segueing from NPR to the local affairs program, so I get momentary snippets of "John Boehner said ..." [snooze, 9 minutes], "The first lady's anti-obesity program ..." [snooze, 9 minutes], "This morning's traffic report ..." [snooze, 9 minutes], "Now for our Radio Kitchen segment with our local hosts to discuss those fresh, marinated vegetable-based salads we're all loving so much in this heat!" [Okay, time to get up.]
This works fine. The 9 minutes snoozing periods involve stretching and sticking my feet out of the covers and wiggling my toes, then pulling up the covers again and turning over here and there. Works fine.
40: *Social Services* cares if your kid is late to school?? Wow.
41: What cellphone program is this.
My sister gave me a tocky, and it promptly got itself lodged behind a couch. I'm not sure I ever dug it out. Eggplant, I'm one of those hateful people. I really need to stop. On the other hand, I feel somewhat justified b/c my partner often says he's ready for bed at, say 11:30 pm, and then manages to use some combination of dithering, chitchat, and sex to delay my actual sleeping until 1 am. So the time I set the alarm for is no longer as related to when I got to sleep as I thought it would be when I got into bed and set it.
I sleep from between 10-11 am to whenever I wake up, hopefully 8 hours later, and then take a brief nap before I go to work at 1 am. Baking is not a career for those who can't wake up easily. I do enjoy waking up without an alarm, once a day, though.
YK: You'd think I could go to bed and get up every 24 hours *without* that much algorithmic help, but no.
In college, I, like LizardBreath, found that the hard parts of rowing often happened before I was awake enough to suffer; but I also really like working in long chunks of time, and we had crew practice every other morning, so I decided to pull an all-nighter every other night and sleep 12 to 16 hours the days after practice. In theory, excellent. In practice, walking into walls and it took me years to get over the insomnia.
(Sleep-as-an-Droid, Ile. I don't think it can help with the dithering and chitchat, though.)
Left to my own devices I'm like YK, but I don't generally have much trouble getting up with an alarm, unless I just sleep right through that is. It doesn't matter how little sleep I've gotten, I might feel absolutely miserable but I'll get up. This may be linked to the 'cigarette, coffee' message that immediately starts running in my brain when I wake up. Addictions are good for you.
Is this advice backed by any studies?
I have the same question. I usually don't do the snooze, though, but sometimes I do and I feel better on the second or third waking. But in the short term; I haven't done any study of my full-day alertness.
I have found in the last couple of years that if I put my contact lenses in immediately, they become sort of cloudy as the day goes on and I have to re-wash them, after which they're fine. Apparently, my eyes produce some protein residue, but I forgot to ask if there's an explicit connection there the last time I had my eyes checked. As a result, I've started getting up even longer before I need to do something than I used to, and then either check the internet (usually) or read a book (less often) before going on to put the contacts in, shave, shower, etc. If I'm in a hurry, I'll put the contacts in last, but it means shaving and showering while nearly blind. Or getting shaving cream on my glasses.
I miss the days when my eyes were fine with gas permeable lenses and I could just put my contacts in and feel instantly awake.
I'm puzzling over what a snooze-button study might look like.
I like to wake up all night long because the baby's nose is congested and so he can't nurse and the nose-sucker thing fell behind the headboard. That way waking up in the morning is no more disorienting than the past eight hours.
52: That sounds really fun, heebie. I gotta remember to procreate one of these days.