Natural Light Alarm Clock

Natural Light Alarm Clock

Anyone who can't get the benefit of waking up to a natural dawn should try out a natural light alarm clock.

The human body isn't set up to wake up to the blaring of an alarm clock. Before modern technology like electric lights and alarm clocks, people were tied to sun in planning out their days. They could only really work as long as the sun was up -- candles existed, but imagine trying to plow a field by candlelight -- and after going to bed they would generally remain asleep until waking naturally.

Their bodies easily fell into the natural rhythm of getting tired when it was dark and waking up to the rising sun. Unfortunately, this isn't an easy proposition now-a-days. Most of us work to schedules that aren't planned around the sun. We often have to get up for work before the sun even rises, while our bodies are still protesting that it's really nighttime and they should be sleeping.

This problem is worse in the winter when there's less sunlight throughout the day, and dawn is much later than other times of year. Daylight saving time doesn't help the spring and fall months, though, purposefully pushing dawn another hour later and forcing more people to get up in the dark to get ready for work and school, feeling tired all the while.

The solution to this is a natural light alarm clock. These alarm clocks allow you to receive the benefits of a real dawn even if you have to wake up early in the morning. You set the time you want to wake up, and the alarm clock starts a simulated dawn over an interval beforehand, so you wake up at the appointed time. Many natural light alarm clocks allow you to specify the interval you want, so you can pick whether you want dawn to start at 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, or however much you want before wake up time.

Natural light alarm clocks usually come with a normal alarm clock function as well, often with many different sounds or custom programming options available. If you're a very heavy sleeper, it can sometimes be good to have a backup, even if it's only to alleve worries of oversleeping. There are also versions that have FM radios.

Some sunrise alarm clocks also have an artificial sunset function, which does the reverse of what the sunrise function does, simulating sunset to make the body ready to fall asleep. Light has just as much of an effect on the ability to fall asleep as it does on the ability to wake up. There's so much artificial light around all the time that the body can easily get confused about when it's time to go to bed. An artificial sunset gives the gradual drop-off in light levels that the body needs to understand it's bed time. Some insomniacs find it very helpful in falling asleep.