Fuzzy Alarm Clock Logic

Anyone else notice that morning logic, particularly the logic your brain spits out in the first 5 minutes after waking up is total crap? And yet, it seems perfectly good at the time.

I am the type of person who is awoken by alarm clocks just enough to find sneaky ways to get around them.  Its a fine line.  If an alarm clock is loud and buzzing and generally incredibly obnoxious I will turn that thing off so fast my sleep cycle is hardly interrupted at all.

On the other hand, if the alarm clock is sort of gentle, doesn't jar me too badly, then I will blissfully hit the snooze button, and then again...again...again.. you get the point.  An alarm clock without a snooze button is scary.  After all, you have total and utter failure, or you get up.  There is no in between.  So I guess you would need to work out the percentage of times when failure occurred, consider the consequences of failure, and determine whether you have an acceptable model.  I think for most people the acceptable percentage of total failure is pretty low.

Obviously when I say total failure, I don't mean the alarm clock, I'm talking failure to get out of bed and get to required duties approximately at accepted time.  I think the fraction of alarm clock failures due to actual alarm clock failure is very low.   There is also human error in things like plugging in, charging, setting, etc. but those do not relate to the morning, those relate to whether your brain is functional at night.  Mine generally does quite well at night, and if yours doesn't, and also doesn't in the morning, well, I think you have bigger problems than your alarm clock.

There are 4 sets of circumstances which have actually worked to get me out of bed in the morning in the past, say, 10 years.




1. Admittedly the most effective.  There is another person next to me who simply will not put up with my alarm clock shenanigans and forces me to face the music.

2. I had an annoying buzzing travel alarm clock with no snooze button.  During a period of extreme determination, I would pick up the alarm clock when it started going off and place it directly next to my ear.  I would hold it mercilessly against my ear until I finally reached through the sleep fog.

3.  I'm not kidding here.  A friend would call me.  Yeah, awesome friend, huh? She would call me, and I learned pretty fast to actually physically get out of bed when the phone rang so that I could legitimately say, I'm up!  And then the guilt that would be associated with crawling back into bed after she had made the effort to help me was too high. I got myself to work.

4. I had patients at the hospital.  I was a med student, so its not like I actually did anything useful other than make them feel better, but nonetheless, I had patients I needed to see, residents to talk to, attendings to present to.  You cannot sleep in, and you get yourself to the hospital by 5:30, 6, whatever.

(I just realized how callous that statement sounded. Yes, it is important to make patients who are hospitalized because they are very ill feel better.  It was the most rewarding aspect of going to medical school by far.)


I am back in extreme alarm clock problems now though.  None of these circumstances is in place.  I changed my alarm clock tone from the one I used in med school because it was just too terrifying.  I think there must be a better alarm clock method.  Okay, there sure as hell better be a better alarm clock method than I'm using, cause this is pathetic failure.

I don't put it next to my bed, way too easy.  I put it on the other side of my room.  The old, well you have to get out of bed and go over to the source of annoying noise.  Not helpful.  I hate any noise whatsoever, so I stumble across the room and hit snooze as fast as possible.  Then I turn, and look, and my bed looks sooooo comfortable.  And I quickly crawl back in and pull the covers tight and smile.  This, these few minutes, are like the best minutes in the day.  This may sound pathetic, but then you obviously don't truly appreciate how wonderful sleep is, because the anticipation of happy blissful sleep is such a lovely feeling.

If I could go with one snooze, no biggie.  But, I will actually go through this ridiculous sequence of steps, like 10 times.  And, I'm not sure about this, because of the whole I'm 90% asleep during this entire process, but I think that each snooze increases the likelihood of another snooze.  Like a kindling effect.  Being sort of aware of this, if I am more than, like 25% awake when I stare down at my phone (doing proxy service as alarm clock) I know.  If I hit that snooze, I'm probably going to hit it again, and again, and again.  And this is where interesting logic and bargaining comes in.  I look at it, making its annoying, but not obnoxious noise, and I say to myself. Okay, you can do this, you can hit snooze once, and that's all.  After that, you're going to get up.  Just one snooze.  This has a failure rate of, oh, 60%.  Better than if I just hit the snooze and got back into bed, but seriously less than ideal.

I do have a few things that work pretty well.  If there is anything where attendance is taken, I show up.  Seminars in the morning are pretty good, but not 100% perfect.  I intentionally schedule meetings for the morning because I will absolutely never, under any circumstances that are under my control, make another person wait.  Never.

One day I tried something which actually worked.  At night, before I went to bed, I took my phone in my hands, stared at it, shook it, and said to myself, 'Tomorrow morning you are fucking going to get up.' Literally.  And I actually do mean literally, not figuratively.  This worked.  Apparently cursing myself angrily at night has some holdover effect on morning me.

This morning, though, I had one of my most extreme examples of alarm clock logic.  You see, I admittedly had a long day yesterday, but not a taxing one.  This morning, alarm clock goes off, I had set it kind of late already.  I stumble out of bed, like completely exhausted.  Totally dead.  I get to phone, look at it, and say to myself  'If you are this tired, you probably shouldn't get up now. Instead you should see what time you would naturally wake up' shut the thing off and went back to sleep.  WTF!? 10:30, that's when I woke up, more than 2 and a half hours after alarm clock went off.

And that's not even the worst of it.  Because, well, I think I have this worked out but have only considered it during periods when I was more asleep than awake so I can't be sure.  So, this morning is trash/recycling day.  Somehow, I think it must be related to this fact, on Thursday morning, after I should be out of the house, someone turns on some machine which could very well be a leaf blower and pretty much blasts, with said high-powered and noisy machine, all around the house.  This takes a long time.  So, this occurred this morning.  On the morning when my early morning logic decided that I would just wait to see when I would wake up, I was dragged awake by this hideous noise, well before 10:30.

Also, I discovered upon achieving full wakefulness, I had clearly climbed out of bed and shut the window in an attempt to minimize the amount of this hideous noise that invaded my brain.  Basically, there is no way I slept, at all, during the 15 minutes or so this machine was on.  But still, I laid there, went back to sleep and woke up at 10:30.  Oh, and I was in bed by midnight last night, I'm not talking about nights where I stayed up until 4 doing something like running around on the internet.  I deserve it then.

I have actually, due to past experiments, discovered that my natural waking time is about 10am.  If I do not set an alarm clock I will not wake up before that, no matter what the circumstances are.  (Therefore I should have known what would happen this morning, but clearly this piece of empirical data was carefully shoved out by my morning brain.) Which basically means I actually require 10 hours of sleep and spend my entire life sleep deprived by several hours each day, or, that my circadian rhythm is longer than 24 hours and I am constantly trying to tug it back so that I can live on the same schedule as all the rest of you people.  Can I be angry at all of you now?

Oh, also, I clearly need to obtain a boyfriend immediately just so that there will be someone to physically eject me from the bed in the morning.