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Alarm Clocks for Heavy Sleepers?
jonadab asks: "I'm a heavy sleeper. I wake up gradually. Sometimes it takes quite a bit to
get me cognizant in the morning. I've been known to sleep through alarms entirely, or shut them off before fully awake and later not remember doing so. It's not that I don't get enough sleep (I go to bed at night when I get sleepy), but my body tends to want a day longer than 24 hours, and I have to use an alarm to keep myself on a constant schedule with the rest of the world;
otherwise, I get up a little later each day and pretty soon I'm sleeping till noon. So I'm always in search of a better alarm clock. Maybe some of you have experience with alarm clocks that you particularly like"
"Here are some features I'd particularly like to have (though anything that's good at waking a heavy sleeper is worth mentioning, even if it doesn't have all these features):
- Gets progressively louder until snoozed. Starts louder with each successive snooze.
- Max volume slightly painful, but not physiologically dangerous. An air compressor and train whistle is probably overkill.
- Easy to snooze, but hard to accidentally turn off completely. Bonus points if turning it off means being cognizant enough to operate a screwdriver or tool of some kind.
- Snooze time gets geometrically shorter each iteration (e.g., half as long as the previous) so that there's a maximum total snooze time that can be approached assymptotically.
- Has battery backup so that it will operate during a power outage, at least to keep time. (I _could_ just stick it on the UPS, but do I really want to spend a UPS outlet for an alarm clock?) This is a feature my current clock has (takes a nine-volt battery), but even better would be a rechargeable that will even operate the alarm during a power outage.
- Can be set to always go off at the same time every day, so I don't have to remember to set it at night unless I need to get up at a different time than usual.
- Has some kind of cool feature with geek appeal -- but not binary time display; I need to be able to read the time when mostly asleep.
If you were going to go the route of building a cheap computer to do this, what software would you use to do it?
I had the same problem, sleeping through classes/Finals/Work/Dates. Not exactly what you were looking for but I got an alarm for the deaf which worked great(I didn't have this exact model but you get the idea). you can put it in your pillow. I used to wear a sock to bed and keep it in there. It never failed to wake me up.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
Instead of buying obnoxious alarm clocks and waking up your neighbors, why don't you just try sleeping like a normal person?
Your brain produces various chemicals that signal your body when it is time to sleep. Sleep runs in cycles that run between 3-4 hours... the more regular the cycle, the better everything works.
Pick a 30 minute window that will be your bedtime and stick to it. If things in your life make that impossible, change them. A healthy adult require something between 6-8 hours of sleep. The more regular your sleep pattern, the less sleep you need. Eventually you'll automatically wake up whenever, and will actually feel good in the morning, instead of being the walking zombie that you are now.
Sleep patterns are incredibly important to your body. In studies of shift workers, people who rotate shifts "backwards" (ie working 12AM to 8AM one week, 4PM to 12AM the next) have accident rates 40% higher than people who rotate "forwards" (ie working 4PM to 12AM one week, 12AM to 8AM the next). Other studies linked increased risks of heart attacks & high blood pressure and car accidents to irregular sleep patterns.
Don't let the excuse "I'm too busy" or "I work better at night" stop you from getting a good night's rest.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I used to be the same way, sleeping through alarms, turning them off before fully waking, until I got a wife. :)
http://www.appealinggifts.com/screaming-alarm-cloc k.html
I had this problem sometimes. The first time I overslept for work, I felt like a tool and worked out a solution.
;)
Set an alarm clock next to your bed. Any ordinary one will do. Use the buzzer setting, and set it for 15 minutes earlier than you need.
Set ANOTHER clock on the far side of your room, with the volume max and the buzzer setting, and set it for 5 minutes earlier than you need.
I sleep through the first, but it makes my brain flinch. The second wakes me up from my already semi-woken state. YMMV.
Also, from a sleep schedule point of view - stop going to bed when you get sleepy. Figure out your morning wake up time, and go to bed 9-10 hours earlier than that at the latest... whether you feel sleepy or not. Eventually you will get used to the schedule, and things will get better. It's about practice.
does exactly what you said. you can lock your screen with a screensaver (so you'll have to enter a password, and being cogniscent), and maybe set up your BIOS to turn the computer on at a given time, if it is supported.
also, every day you can wake up with a different music to get a different mood (ever heard about 'mood organs' in "do android dream electric sheeps"?)
cheers
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
We've found that having a bright light on a timer (X10 does nicely) helps, too. There's nothing like having 150 watts of "oh my god turn that off" on your eyes to wake you up. Actually, I think it subtly starts the wakeup process, which completes when the loud alarm goes off a couple minutes later.
:)
Of course, if your wakeup time is after sunrise, this probably won't help much.
You could always rig up a smoke detector buzzer, but that's probably not something you should really get sensitized to....
While you are falling asleep, imagine a clock showing the time you want to wake up.
I am a very heavy sleeper - to the extent that someone was able to get a locksmith to drill through the security lock on a door with me 10 metres (or 11 yards if you are a NASA scientist) away - but this works for me, and I just need the three chimes of a standard palm pilot alarm to remind me to get up.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Most people prefer a 24 hour day. I used to live a 26 - 26.5 hour day when I was a student, now I prefer about 25 hours. Thing to do is cycle round. Assume 8 hours sleep and need to be up by 8AM. Go to sleep at 9PM monday, 10PM tuesday, 11PM wednesday, 12PM thursday, then stay up all night friday, until arround 6PM saturday, then get 12 hours sleep and go to bed at 8PM sunday. Probably not healthy, but I've done it before, and when I start shift work in a few months I'll be doing something similar to get back onto days.
/dev/urandon > /dev/dsp" too, but I'm getting better now.
Another thing: Turn everything off (even the PC) and lie in bed for an hour. You should be asleep unless it's ridicuously early.
For waking up, I need to be up at 8:30AM at the moment to leave at 9:30AM. I set the 3 alarms on my mobile phone, 8AM, 8:15 and 8:25, and plug it in on the other side of the room. I also set my normal radio alarm clock to come on quietly at 7:30AM (when wogan comes on), and stay on until 8:30AM (meaning I have to get up to turn it back on).
I used to have a cron job of "cat
Keep the clock out of reach, once you get up you'll stay up.
I go to college with a large deaf population. You would need to be able to sleep through an earthquake to be able to miss this.
*Cough*Google*Cough*
This site advertises clocks for the hearing-impared that register up to 113 decibels, and have gadgets that shake the bed and flash lamps.
These clocks seems a little more subtle, though.
Remember, he does not want an uber-expensive solution (and half your assets counts as pretty expensive to:)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I've got an RCA RP3715A, that i think was no more than $20-$30cdn, but does most of what you're looking for. http://www.rca.com/product/viewdetail/0,2588,PI459 18,00.html.
- Has two different alarms that can be set, and will then go off at those times every day without having to be reset. (Music and what I like to call Insane-O-Wake)
- The "tone" (Insane-O-Wake) alarm starts quietly and gets progressively louder, and this thing is VERY LOUD, it wakes up both my roomates who are a few feet down the hall and on occasion think the alarm is in their room, if i'm i'm not there to turn it off (a downside to having it not need to be reset).
- It has the option of a 9v battery to keep time if the power goes off
- Large easy to hit snooze button, if you hold down the snooze button, the snooze duration increases..
It's great, I'd highly reccommend it. Although my roomates might not.
Cheers,
If you have to get out of bed and cross the room to shut if off, you probably won't go back to sleep. If you do, you have problems an alarm clock won't fix.
The only problem is that some people like it close to the bed so that they won't be that far away from the sound. The farther you are away, the louder it has to be, and may annoy someone else.
Maybe someone could create an alarm clock where the controls are in a box on the other side of the room, but the alarm is in a receiver next to your bed. This puts the alarm next to your head, but forces you to get up to shut it off.
sigfault. comment dumped.
If you are having problems getting up, then DON'T USE SNOOZE!
You are just training yourself in a bad habit - "Don't need get up. Go sleep more. Noise not important".
Instead, put whatever you use to awaken yourself out of reach of the bed - preferably on the other side of the room. MAKE yourself get up and walk over to the alarm to turn it off. Then, KEEP MOVING - go fix your coffee or whatever you do when you get up.
Speaking of coffee - should you be an imbiber of morning caffinated hot beverages, invest in a timer controlled coffee pot. Set it to start about 10 minutes before your alarm goes off. Put it in a place where the aroma of brewing coffee (or whatever) will reach you.
Most people are training themselves to be insomniacs - watching TV or reading in bed, staying up to catch that "gotta see it" show instead of sleeping when they are tired, hitting snooze in the mornings. Beds should be used for two things only - sleep and sex. Anything else should be done elsewhere.
I trained myself to go to sleep within minutes of hitting the bed in college, when I had Calc II at 7:30 and my next class was at 10:30 - go to calc, go back to room, sleep some more, then go to chemistry. I refined this when I was working 80 hours a week at my first job - go home over lunch, catch a 30 minute powernap, then back to work. As I understand it, this is also what the various military services train you to do - "Don't stand if you can sit. Don't sit if you can lie down. If you can lie down, go to sleep."
www.eFax.com are spammers
I realize this isn't quite what you were asking, but consider going to a sleep clinic.
Do you snore? Is your neck bigger than 16"? If either of these are true, odds are decent that you have sleep apnea. I do. Or rather "did." Had my uvula and tonsils taken out (plus had my septum straightened, it was heavily deviated).
When I wake up, it feels like I'm drugged. Literally. I wish I knew why, too. Once apnea was diagnosed, I assumed that going through surgery would stop this drug-like trance from happening. It didn't, but it helped a little. Plus I don't snore at all any more. It used to keep my former girlfriend up all night.
Sorry for rambling. I guess what I'm saying is that I'll be reading the replies to your post because I have the same needs/problems when it comes to waking. And checking to see if you have apnea could actually save your life while making your sleep a lot more restful.
My
Limekiller
Since cost is an issue, you're not going to get most of your (useless to the problem) requirements met. If I wanted to do so, I'd probably dedicate a (cheezy) computer to it and have to write the darn software myself. Luckily, I have more important things to worry about...
I'd recommend the simple expedient of two alarm clocks.
I went to Sears and bought a cheap Panasonic (iirc) alarm clock radio/cd with 2 alarms and progressive volume. (The progressive volume has a min setting and a max setting, but not a duration setting (silly of them)). It was pretty cheap, like $35-45 a year and a half ago.
For you, I'd recommend two of them (or one of those and one of what you already have). One by your bedside, one across the room, requiring you to haul your backside out of bed, at least.
I just leave mine single one across the room, and have it turn on talk radio (two settings, starts low, waits a few minutes, the second gets much louder). Depending on the station I set it to, it usually infuriates me into wakefulness.
(I recommend NPR if you are a heartless conservative or Rush or Bill O' if you are a flaming liberal gasbag).
However, I bet the real problem is not the waking, it's the sleeping - getting to sleep/staying asleep. If you find yourself waking up at night out of breath, or if you snore, or your gf/wife/so hears you stop breathing during the night, see a sleep doctor. Skip the last can/bottle/gallon of caffeinated soda, cut out cigs if you smoke, keep the room cool. Melatonin works well for sleep regulation if taken aperiodically, and consider Ambien for periodic regulation (note that it's addictive - not in the heroine withdrawal way, but if you use it too often, you get to feel like you can't get to sleep without it - a feeling which goes away after a few days, but still...).
Ambien is magic to those who have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep - bed down, one pill, read for 15 minutes, turn off the light, I'm down for 7.5 hours almost exactly and wake up feeling like a tiger. IANAD, YMMV.
-J
Easy to snooze, but hard to accidentally turn off completely. Bonus points if turning it off means being cognizant enough to operate a screwdriver or tool of some kind.
I had exactly this problem. I solved it by getting an alarm clock loud enough to wake me up from across the room (RadioShack, $15 tops). Caltrops can be useful to make it so that walking across your room is difficult. Now I've trained myself pretty well to snooze rather than disable the alarm, but the walk across the room is helpful because it means that even getting up to hit snooze wakes me up a little.
When I was in a smaller room (everything could be reached without getting out of bed), I wrapped packing tape around the off button on the alarm. I could only hit snooze unless I removed the tape.
I can't tell you how many mornings I woke up struggling to remove that tape.
The only way I've ever had decent sleeping habits was when I spent time outdoors away from any artificial light. Within 24 hours, I perfectly adjusted to falling asleep at sundown and waking just before sun up. Weird to think that I was going to sleep at 8:30 PM and waking up at 5:00 AM without any prompting.
I wish I had the self control to do that normally.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Write a shell script to beep your pc speaker continually for 10 minutes after this time, it should preceed to rm -rf / *
Set cron to start this script whatever time you want to wake up.
When you hear the beeping you will run to your computer to send an interupt, the adrenaline rush will wake you up.
Best results obtained when T ~ cat's feeding time.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
Now, i have two alarm clocks- one at the head of the bed, and one across the room. The one at the head of my bed is my handheld, which has three alarms, each more annoying than the last. By the time the one across the room goes off, i'm ready to wake up... But in case i'm not, the handheld goes off fifteen minutes later, on the same set-of-three schedule. Eventually, it gets annoying enough to wake me completely.
On an interesting side note, when we moved into a house that my family lived in some years back, one window was broken. Outwards. Lying in the broken glass- this was a real 'fixer-upper' of a house- was a rusted alarm clock. We looked at it for a moment, realised what had happened, and just laughed. (Remembering how early i've had to wake up for some of the times i've moved, i can honestly say it's only luck that i've never done the same.)
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Just as a dark room helps us sleep. . . light helps us wake up. How about getting a bedroom light that plugs into the wall and use a simple timer from RadioShack as a supplement to your alarm.
hlygrail (700685) sez: "Most sleep researchers have concluded that the human body clock runs around 25 hours per cycle. The obvious conflict with our 24-hour terrestrial/lunar/solar-based clock is noticed by more than few folks who've replied already."
This is a very disturbing discrepency. The human diurnal cycle does not match the earth's rotation. If humans evolved here, you'd expect it to be 24 hours, or even less (the earth's rotation is slowing, from less than 24 hours).
Evolutionarily, we can only come to one conclusion: humans did not originate on earth. Furthermore, there is only one planet we know of that has a rotation that matches humans' 25 hour diurnal rhythm: Mars.
Don't blame ME if the facts make sense; I'm only a scientist.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I had at one point 3 alarms, at opposition points in the room for this very purpose.
No more.
Instead, I use a system tray application that plays mp3's as an alarm.
Now heres the kicker - you have to right click on the icon in the system tray for it to deactivate.
When your resolution is 1280+, and its first thing in the morning, you generally *will* wake up in the process of:
Turning the $(*^ed monitor on
Moving the sleeping cordless mouse
Moving it to the system tray
Right clicking the CORRECT icon
As in that wasnt enough, I have two scheduled: one for early, and one for "I'm going to be late for work!".
The controls to deactivate one or the other is not the kind of thing you can do without waking up.
For the record, the MP3 I play is the sound clip from "So I married an Axe Murderer", in which Mike Meyers does the great routine about a kid with a huge head..
"HEAD! PAPER! NOW!" (and it goes on for ~ 20 seconds and then loops).
Very jarring, very loud, and yet, after over 100 days of hearing it, I still laugh when he says.. "That was offsides.. yeah, he's going to cry himself to sleep on his HUGE PILLOW".
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
I have the same problem. I'm going to go in for a sleep study, but until then, I rotate alarms. For me, it seems that after a while, I will get used to an alarm's sound and learn to ignore it. After selecting a new alarm sound (alarm clock beep, radio, palm pilot alarm, cel phone alarm) every 2-3 weeks, I wake up faster. Also, having something that lights up or vibrates helps, too.
I tend to be a heavy sleeper and lazy waker. When I was younger, the alarm volume used to get progressively louder (bumping it up a notch after sleeping through something important) until I had my stereo probably close to all the way up. Still overslept. The key, for me, was mind practice.
When I go to sleep, I no longer just lie down and thoughtlessly drift into sleep. When I do that, I tend to wake up in the same state of mind: thoughtlessly drifting. When I lie down to sleep nowadays, I make my plan for the next morning. Even if it's the routine plan, I force myself to think about what time I need to be up and out of bed by. Bring it all to the front of my mind. What I've found is that, when I wake up after having done this, I feel prepared for the day and spring out of bed -- without residual sluggishness.
And a cool side effect? My alarm clock radio is barely audible. It's as if preparing myself to hear that sound, the night before, makes actually picking it up from the depths of sleep really easy.
Only time I oversleep anymore is when my liver needs a little extra rest.
YMMV of course.
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
You might consider having a sleep clinic check you out for sleep apnea. Just a thought, in case you haven't considered it.
My roomate in college used to have horrible problems sleeping through things.
On extra important occasions, he'd activate the "Super Soaker Protocol"--
Ten minutes before the designated wake-up time, I'd start loading the super-soaker, and every minute on the minute I'd give him a warning. Then he'd get a count-down for the last 30 seconds... and if he wasn't on his feet by the time the countdown hit zero, he knew damn well that he'd get soaked.
He never once failed to get up... but I never gave up hope that one time I'd get to soak his lazy ass..
but alas...
A friend of mine is notorious for sleeping through alarm clocks.
One day, as a gift, he received an alarm clock that was super loud. It looked like it was made in the 70's, it was huge and had that same "plastic that looks like wood" sort of decoration that my 83 Monte Carlo has... Nowadays, electronics are all smaller, more streamlined, more "japanese" feeling.
Anyway, when I first heard it, I said it sounded like a foghorn, and that name, "The Foghorn", stuck, although it was a bit of a misnomer. On the spot, I couldn't remember the sound that it made, although I remembered relatively quickly. It didn't sound like a foghorn, but it sound exactly like a shop vac. It even ramped up just like one, and it moved a ton of air through this big blower.
It sounded just like a shop vac, it didn't beep or turn the noise off and on, it was just one continuous "vrooom" that was certainly way too loud to talk over... (You know how shop vacs are louder than normal vacuum cleaners)
Well, maybe because the sound was monotonous, my friend started sleeping through this noise anyway... He said that he would just incorporate the noise in his dreams. Literally, the thing would be like 3 feet from his head, and like I said, way too loud to talk over or anything, and he'd be sleeping through it. If you were outside of his house, even with all the doors and windows shut, you could hear it, but he'd be sleeping.
This was in high school, and we eventually left for college. He had 2 roommates for awhile, and then one of his roommates swapped rooms with somebody else.
So, the first night the new guy wsa sharing the room with him (the third roommate was somewhere else that night), my friend gets woken up in the morning. His new roommate is shaking him and saying "Chris wake up, there's a fire drill!" He says "No dude, that's just my alarm", and rolls over and hits the snooze button. His new roommate just stands there and says "Oh my fucking god"...
That's it.
Don't bother snoozing. It's self-indulgent and offers less real benefit than going to bed twenty minutes earlier. If you have a very hard time waking up, you probably aren't sleeping as well as you should. Possibilities include excess sugar, caffeine or alcohol; sleep apnea; depression or anxiety; attention deficit disorder; or simple lack of exercise. Chances are that adjusting your caffeine intake and going for the occasional walk will make a substantial difference.
The best thing about a Screaming Meanie is setting it for one hour and hiding it in somebody else's room. The second-best is that it is physically tough enough to throw violently across the room without suffering any damage.
This is not my sandwich.
Kids
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
...from my computer, and set the phone to emit a loud series of beeps when I receive an SMS. It is impossible to turn off from the phone (unless you turn off the phone itself, but the keyboard should be locked anyway).
I've found that sometimes setting my alarm up a few hours early helps. I get through the stumble phase, get some clothes rather, things set by the door, flop back to bed under a light pillow until alarm #2. For some reason this seems to satisfy my desire to "go back to bed" so that I feel better on the second waking. Also nice if you aren't sleeping well as you can adjust you comfort levels for the addition 2-3h sleep.
I don't think anyone should do this. I am only explaining what I once did in undergrad:
1) subscribe to a 976 style wake-up phone call service
2) buy an adapter that turns your phone ringing into an AC pulse - they are for the hard of hearing, so that a lamp can flicker on and off to indicate the phone is ringing. Got mine for $11 back in '92. It is a wall adapter that has a phone jack an AC plug, and an AC outlet on it.
3) hook a powerstrip to it
4) set the powerstrip to OFF.
5) plug a stereo with your least favorite LP on the turntable and the needle down. turn it way up. Also works with a cassette player, so long as you FF to the middle of a song, and press PLAY.
6) plug a drill into it, pull the trigger, and lock the trigger.
7) put a paint-stir bit on the drill
8) put the drill down in the bed with you.
When the phone call comes, you had better wake up. It is very unplesant. I only did it once, and it worked perfectly. This music blared, the lights went on and off, and this thing, which got bigger and bigger as it gathered more sheets, was jumping around in the bed, and it is starting to restrict your motion.
My plan now is to pattent this device that gives you immediate access to your fight or flight subroutine.
kulakovich
There was a news story a year or so ago about a german girl who invented an alarm bed lift. Basically, it lifts two legs of the bed a bit at a time until it dumps out the occupant. Her dad was an oversleeper, IIRC.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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