In two of the last three films we saw, people got up as soon as their alarm clocks went off. I know films aren't noted for realism in many respects, but I wondered how widespread this was. So, a poll:

Poll #1442004
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

What do you do when your alarm goes off?

(I wondered whether to phrase it as "wake up" or "get up". I mean "become fully conscious so that you could get up if you felt like it", I think. Sitting up in bed and reading counts.)

I don't like wasting an hour of each day snoozing, but I'm not sure what to do about it.

A few months ago I got a SleepTracker, which is a watch with an accelerometer-thingy in it, so it can tell when you move in your sleep. It reckons movement corresponds to the shallowest points in your sleep cycle, or "almost-awake moments". So you give it a window, like 8:00-8:30, and it beeps to wake you up at the first "almost-awake moment" in that window, on the grounds that waking from that should be easier. It worked well for a month or so - it would wake me and I'd feel fully awake. But now it's no better than a normal alarm clock. I sleepily silence it and fall back to sleep. I suspect its success owed as much to the placebo effect, and the slightly-increased cognitive load of silencing an unfamiliar device, as to sleep cycles.

So I think novelty helps. If I had lots of alarm clocks, and a different random one went off each morning, that might work, at least for a while. Waking up for something outside the normal routine is also easier - not just fun things like holidays, but also annoying things like answering the door to cold-callers or having to break up cat-fights in the landing.

Communication also helps. A silly idea that occurred to me this morning is that if I had a Chumby like simont has (or I could just do it on my PDA) I could write an alarm that could only be silenced using a piece of information derived from a passphrase I have and a passphrase Alex has, so we'd have to wake up enough to talk to each other. (Obviously we wouldn't use that alarm if one of us was away.) Although you can have a conversation while semi-conscious and fall back to sleep and forget about it, that's probably less likely if the conversation topic is something real like how do we shut this blasted thing up?

I've also heard about someone who locked his alarm clock in a trunk and put the key in a bucket of icy water. Never tried that one yet, but to gain an extra hour in each day it might be worth it...

Tags: alarms, life, polls, sleep
Current Mood: sleepy