https://www.philips.ca/c-p/HF3670_60/smartsleep-connected-sl...
It's a sunrise and sunset alarm clock. I wake up at 5:15 AM on a daily basis and 20 minutes before, the light starts with increasing brightness. At 5:08 AM, I have selected ocean waves for the sound and at 5:15 the loud alarm comes on.
It's been a dramatic change for me with this. I would normally get 7 to 7.5 hours of sleep but would have a very hard time waking up and more often than not, would go back to sleep.
With this arrangement, it's been really wonderful. I now tend to be mostly awake before the main alarm comes on and I am able to just get up.
I know this is not a inexpensive option but there are other models without the bells and whistles.
one thing i have noticed being a night owl is that even during periods where i am sleeping "normally" (i.e., early) and waking up moderately early is that i still hate the mornings. i could be making this up, but it feels quite inherent to me that i do not like the climate and sunlight in the morning. the climate transitions that happen at night and also the light at twilight have always been extremely calming to me.
when i was younger, i would play basketball during the evenings and into the night. during the summer, i would also get up early and workout and practice, and it was always a complete slug, despite being well rested. the air and light just feels different for me in the mornings. also, when i wake up and immediately shower, like for a workday, it feels worse than when i sleep in on the weekends, am awake for an hour or two, and then shower.
i have no idea if that's really what's going on, but that's what it feels like to me.
Does the newer model mitigate this issue?
I'm pretty sure the biggest change which made me an early riser was my diet though. I stopped drinking sugary drinks and cut out carbs almost entirely after midday. Diet is mostly meat, some dairy (but lactose intolerant). I only drink water or zero-sugar drinks after midday too. I drink Coffee as soon as I wake and only up to midday.
I no longer work the same job, but I still wake up around 0430 every day and do a couple of hours programming before I go to the gym for an hour, then have breakfast at 0800.
Also stopped watching TV before sleeping. When I do watch TV in bed I feel like shit in the morning. Now I turn off the screens around 2000 and am in bed by around 2200. I rarely watch any TV anyway, but still spend a large part of the day at the computer screen.
You don't really make a switch from being a night owl. I thought I'd made switches multiple times too:
* Taking early classes in college * Deliberately cooling myself down and going to bed super early * Getting a puppy that forced me to wake up super early
Every single method regressed to night-owl schedule within 2 months. Not to mention my productivity and learning ability took a nosedive during the periods I was waking up early.
This is over a period spanning 15 years, so it involves multiple stages of life as well.
Agreed. At 46, and having been a night-owl pretty much my entire life, I'm skeptical that you can just "switch" to another mode. Maybe you can, through very conscious and focused effort, manage to adapt to what appears to be a "morning person" lifestyle; but I suspect that people who do that are ultimately just faking it.
That said, I've never looked at being a night-owl as something that needed to be "fixed" or something that I'd want to change.
When I had to wake at 4:30 for work, I hated it. Now that I don't have to go to work so early, I love getting up early, because those first couple of hours are my most productive. There are zero distractions and my mind is fresh from a good sleep. I'd rather have these most productive hours for myself, whereas when I was getting up and going straight to work, I'd only have the evening hours where I was already exhausted after working 13 hours.
I'm almost certain I couldn't do it without the proper diet and exercise though. If I let go with the diet or stopped going to the gym, I reckon I'd probably slip back to becoming a night owl, and become more lazy too.
It does mean that I'm tired by 11 or midnight, but even when left entirely on my own schedule (kids away on school vacation), my "new" natural schedule persists.
I didn't seek to change it (and if it drifted back later, I might even be slightly happier).
May not work for everyone...
Time will tell.
Or running civic services 7 AM - 3 PM which makes it impossible to schedule without a free day or understanding boss. Something that should be available with perhaps only a minor downtime works only for a few hours.
The cumulated morning/evening hours tend to overload transportation facilities too.
I've noticed it already in my 30s, I can no longer sleep in so easily and have to get up, even if I'm tired.
Unfortunately it is because older people tend to have poorer sleep quality in general (less time in deep sleep cycles) so that's a pretty big downside.
I really did force the change for myself and it totally sucked going through it. I still don't just jump out of bed and feel instantly great. It takes 30 minutes or so to get fully awake. For example, this morning I so did not want to get up because I stayed up until 1 am. However, I did get up at 5:30 am anyway. It was awful and I'm dragging today. Caffeine helps as well.
I work for a transportation company and there are a lot of field people that have moved in to c-level positions and have the "butts in seats" mentality and I think that's why after 12 years of 9:30 - 10:00 am starts, suddenly I get smacked with a "needs improvement" on my review. And our technology department is having big problems retaining talent.
I tried a bunch of things, but eating at the right time helps.
If I eat too close to bedtime, I think my sleep is initially ok (food makes you sleepy), but it's possible it disturbs my sleep or I get acid reflux or something.
If I eat too far from bedtime, I wake up I suspect because my blood sugar is low -- and of course the body produces adrenaline when that happens.
I built an automated lighting system such that dawn in my house comes at 6 am and gets gradually brighter. In the evening, it gradually dims, going out entirely at 10. As long as my ambient lighting is the only thing on in the evenings, I reliably go to sleep between 10 and 11 pm. But if I leave my non-automated task lighting on, I don't get sleepy until hours later, which easily can lead to me falling back into night-owl mode.
I avoid that because my mood is much less even when I'm a late riser, so I'm not advocating that anybody necessarily follow my approach. But if people do want help going to bed on time and getting up early, I strongly recommend automated ambient lighting in key rooms that mimics a natural day-night cycle (but with little or no seasonal variation).