It’d be great if we could get eight hours of good sleep every day, but the pressures of work or home life can make this lofty goal difficult to achieve. Even so, there are a few tips you can employ to improve your chances of greeting the morning with an energetic smile, as opposed to a depressed moan.
Mark Frost over at HackCollege has posted a few techniques you can use in an effort to become a morning person. His second piece of advice is one I’ve recently used myself to great effect and if you find yourself with the opportunity to leave your alarm off, I’d recommend trying this out:
Don’t set your alarm — This may not work for everyone … but when you’re setting your bedtime early enough and getting around 8 hours, you’ll find yourself waking up without the assistance of an alarm clock or angry roommate. What’s even better is that you might develop the habit of waking up at an exact time without the alarm.
Of course, once you do find yourself getting up without an alarm, there’s nothing wrong with setting one anyway, just in case. The advantage here is that you’ll still get up when you need to (or an hour or so before), but you’ll wake up naturally… and feeling like you actually have slept.
Image: Michael Mandiberg / Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0
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Comments
4 responses to “Waking Up Without An Alarm And Other Tips For Better Sleep”
I stopped using an alarm for waking up about seven months ago. It works.
There are a few things that go with it, and why it works for me. I either ride my bicycle to work, or take a train, but I’m never likely to wake up so late that I would not get to work at a reasonable hour. If I wake up in a ‘window’ between 4:30 and 5am I get out of bed, even though ideally I wouldn’t wake before 5. The reason is that I won’t get back to sleep properly after 4:30, or if I do, it would mean I sleep for another two hours or more.
I’ve only rarely slept past 6am without an alarm, and I figure that if I do sleep that ‘late’ my body is telling me something so its no big deal.
I live in Sydney so its easier to wake without an alarm, because it becomes sunny reasonably early in the morning all year round. I am not sure this would work further south, where in mid winter it can be dark at 7:30am.
Anyway, waking without an alarm is a natural way of sleeping, so do it if you can. Now, to try to come up with a way of falling asleep naturally.
I agree I usually after some time you can rely on your body to wake up at a given hour.. It’s still good insurance. Employers often unfortunately don’t understand “my body was telling me something but i’m not directly sick” lol
I typically wake up a minute before my alarm goes off.
Doesn’t work for certain industries. Some days I need to get up at 4:30am, some days 7am, and getting up at 4:30 all the time would absolutely kill my evenings.