But if I did have to get up during some ungodly hour mostly frequented by larks and milkmen, I’d want to be torn from the arms of Morpheus by the metaphorical hands of some bit of cutting-edge kit. I’m fortunate enough to say that I’ve never had a problem getting up in the morning, but that’s mostly because I’m a freelance hack and, as such, don’t get up before the crack of noon anyway, and much the same can be said of the 11.7 million people who found themselves on furlough the last awful couple of years. Either that or staying up all night wondering why nobody ever swipes right on you… I’d, erm, imagine. You may compare to the way Victorian ‘knocker-uppers’ became equally defunct when alarm clocks themselves first became widely available.īut while smartphones all come packing an alarm app capable of disturbing even teenagers from their slumber, experts with brains immeasurably larger than ours in the fields of psychology (and something I’ll just label ‘sleep science’) are pointing a big scientific finger of blame at said smartphones as the cause of rising insomnia cases.Īccording to an official-looking site on the internet, the blue light emitted by the devices delays the production of melatonin in the brain, making it difficult to doze off and leading to a complete failure to achieve 40 winks that is followed by a world of fatigue. Plus, if you really want to stay off the scroll, a smartphone isn’t required to set it up or operate it.In an age where pretty much anyone with opposable thumbs is in possession of an all-singing, all-dancing, fancy Dan smartphone, the standalone alarm clock may seem like outmoded technology. Also, there’s white noise and a bunch of other cool features, like using Bluetooth to listen to podcasts and music in bed (Francky loves playing sleep-inducing stories about King Arthur for some reason). I picked some waves and some kind of gong thing, and now I wake up every morning feeling like I’m emerging from a narcotic cloud of bliss and pure light-it’s like the auditory equivalent of the smell of bacon and pancakes. I tried the Loftie, and loved its features: I could turn off the numbers at night, and it’s easy to set up it uses two different alarms in tandem, which you can choose, and which can be ultra soothing but also loud enough to wake you up. This is one such situation (another is the Balmuda toaster). (Feel free to head over to her review for more details on why she loved it.) Occasionally, there is a product whose hype matches or is even exceeded by how delightful the thing actually is. When starting the process of looking for an alarm clock, I consulted with my colleague, Francky Knapp, who had tested the insanely popular Loftie a while back and had determined that it was actually great. In perhaps the only time I have ever obeyed my therapist, I realized the true appeal of returning to my former relaxing mornings, and so I began looking for an alarm clock. When I told her I hated alarm clocks, she said that if I really wanted to wake up earlier, feel more refreshed, and overcome my depressing morning doomscroll, this was the way getting a nice alarm clock would allow me to leave my phone in the other room all night and not check it until I started work. Usually she simply listens to me go off, but in one session, she swooped in with a mission: Go get an alarm clock. It started to make me feel genuinely very bad about myself, so I inevitably began complaining to my therapist. Not good for your mind, your body, or your mood. It got so bad that some days I was literally setting a 9 a.m. for my remote job that begins at 9 I’d take maybe 10 minutes to wake up, then look at my phone for up to half an hour, then make coffee and take my meds, eventually slithering to my office down the hall around 9:30. Today, however, in the weird era of WFH, I transitioned to waking up at 8:30 a.m. I remember back in the old days (pre-2020), when I had an actual office to go to, I’d rise around 7:30 a.m., make a nice pour over coffee, maybe read in my rocking chair for a bit, do some stretching or yoga if my body asked for it, and then roll to the office wholly refreshed and put together. I’ve never been a scrolling-at-night-in-bed person, though I know many are I have become, however, a 20- to 30-minute morning phone reader. Cut to today, when screens of another kind bring suffering.
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