A Year Without an Alarm Clock

I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that I was in danger.

I sprung from my bed out into the darkness of the night, relying on my animal instincts to keep me alive.

My heart was pounding like a herd of wild elephants. My temples and armpits began to pour sweat, which soon spread to the rest of my body. My head reeled as I tried to make sense of where I was and what I was doing.

As I finally started to get my bearings, I realized that my impending sense of doom was a result of the loud noise filling my bedroom.

In a couple more seconds I was able to comprehend that it wasn’t a loud, mysterious sound, but an alarm on my phone that I selected for its soothing sound.

I wasn’t in danger, and it wasn’t the middle of the night. It was just time to get up and go to work.

An Endlessly Repeating Nightmare

That exact scenario has happened to me more times than I can count.

I’ve never been one of those people who can function well on little sleep, but since I live in a culture that treats sleep deprivation as a badge of honor, I’ve always felt the temptation to give in to it.

My friends, my familiy, and my colleagues all constantly brag about how little sleep they get. It feels like a competition at times, with everyone trying to one-up the other with how little sack time they got the night before.

College was my initiation into this club, with long nights and early mornings going hand-in-hand. Entering the “real world,” where you have to, y’know, actually get up in the morning to go to work only made things worse.

At the same time, I read the near-unanimous support to the idea that we should be getting much more sleep than we are, which most people struggle to achieve.

And so, last winter, after one too many mornings waking up in a way similar to the introduction, I decided to take drastic measures.

I decided to spend a year without an alarm clock and see what happened.

The History of Sleep

Since I know someone will point it out if I don’t, there is some evidence that excessive sleeping is associated with increased mortality.

But fear not, Rip van Winkles-in-training. This is all a part of the media’s love affair with twisting science to sensationalize and get more eyeballs on their content.

Take a look at statistics 101 here, guys. Correlation does not equal causation. Things that appear to be linked in a certain way often aren’t.

Take the issue of sleeping “too much.” What the analysis of this data often fails to account for is that many people who oversleep do so because they are sick in the first place.

In other words, sometimes people are sleeping a lot because they are in rough shape, not vice versa.

Take a look at things from a 30,000 foot level.

Brace yourself…

Before the advent of the light bulb, people regularly slept around 9 to 10 hours per night.

Could anyone even function in normal society today with that kind of time flushed down the toilet?

Counting Sheep, Relaxing Harder

One of the three pillars of health and fitness here at LMVM is relaxing harder, which is all too often a neglected part of the equation.

And one of the biggest components of relaxing harder is getting enough sleep.

The underlying benefit of relaxing harder is that you eliminate the chronic stress that most of us suffer from.

In doing so, you reduce levels of cortisol, a hormone that can cause your body to automatically burn muscle and accumulate fat, with the added benefits of reducing your risk for diseases such as ulcers and just helping you to enjoy your life more.

Our modern world is flooded with light–even well after the sun has set–and it may very well be wreaking havoc on our bodies due to disruptions to our hormones.

Sleep deprivation is associated with higher body fat levels. It will reduce your testosterone levels. And it will make you ugly.

Despite the immense societal pressures against it, getting a lot of sleep is an essential step towards improving your health.

And since I have struggled so much with it, I knew it was time to really challenge myself to get more.

I knew it would be worth my while to challenge myself to give up the alarm clock entirely for a year.

My Sleep, My Struggle

On 31 January 2010, I turned off my phone’s morning alarm with the intention to keep it off for the next 365 days.

It was one of the scariest things I had ever done.

And at first, it was worse than anything I could have imagined.

The first days of January, I slept the same amount of time that our ancestors who lived before the notoriously sleep-hating Thomas Edison did: 9-10 hours per night.

Since my usual sleep pattern before this was around 4 to 6 hours per night, I was losing somewhere between 3 and 6 hours each and every day than I had before.

Extrapolated out over a year, this meant that I would be losing the equivalent of somewhere between 46 AND 91 DAYS!

Holy shit! Panic! Terror! Could I really expect to lose 2 or three months over the course of a year?

As it turned out, I was (mostly) wrong.

After a few weeks of making like Rip van Winkle and catching up on many years of sleep deprivation, the amount of sack time it took for me to wake up naturally decreased back down to slightly less than 8 hours.

I tracked my sleep obsessively at first, but after the same incident that caused me to lose the “after” data in my Average Joe Diet, I lost over three months worth of data.

No worries.

I had doubted the precision of the data since the first week of January. Since I was starting the timer when I turned out the light, I wasn’t taking into account the time it takes for me to actually fall asleep.

Normally I drift off in probably less than five minutes, but there are enough times that I toss and turn for a while that I couldn’t be too certain how much the data correctly represented how much sleep I was getting each night.

I simply spent the next 8+ months without using an alarm clock and called it good enough.

But there were plenty of snags, which I’m sure have caused most of you to scream at your screens at me by now.

First off, I need to talk about the elephant in the room. How the hell did I not lose my job during this year?

No, I’m not a trust fund kid or some kind of “productivity expert” with plenty of money and time to spare. Like most of you, I have to drag my sorry ass to a 9-to-5 five days a week.

However, I am fortunate in that I work a job where the specific hours I work don’t mean a damn. As a researcher, most of my work is very abstract. I don’t deal with clients and the results I deliver are the only real standard of job performance rather than how much “butt in seat time” I put in.

But to be fair, I wasn’t sleeping ‘til noon every day anyways. For the most part, I was waking up in the early morning and getting into work the same time as everyone else, but I was much less stressed out since I didn’t have any artificial timeline I had to stick to.

Also, sleeping in wasn’t really an option even if I wanted to.

I live with my wife and a batshit-crazy dog. If I was holed up all by myself, I might be able to institute a strict sleep policy, but unfortunately I need to sync up with the others in my house.

Lastly, I must admit: I didn’t make it every morning without an alarm clock. There were about four times I used one while traveling to make sure I didn’t miss some important deadline early in the morning of a time zone I wasn’t used to.

But about 360 days alarm-free is still pretty awesome in my book! 😉

What I Learned, Where I’m Going

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this experiment it is this: I am crazy productive in the morning if I start it on the right foot.

It used to be that I’d just “brute force” my way through the day, sweating and achy, unable to think straight. Sure, I’d technically be up for a long time and able to cram a lot into those hours, but I was so slow and dim-witted that it wasn’t really paying for itself.

On the other hand, if I can wake up naturally, I can basically jump right out of bed and power through the day in style. Although I’m up for fewer hours, I’m able to blaze through everything at a speed that more than makes up for it.

So now that the experiment’s over will I be resetting the alarm?

Oh, hell no.

The fact is I don’t need an alarm. And although the early-risers keep me from getting out of hand with my sleeping in, this is a lifestyle habit that I’m in no rush to shake.

We found a winner here, folks.

A Practical Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep

Look anywhere on the interwebs for tips on how to get a good night’s sleep and you’ll find the following:

• Go to sleep early every night.
• Go to sleep at the same time every night.
• Make your bedroom completely quiet and pitch dark.
• Use the bedroom for nothing other than sex and sleeping.
• Take a cold shower or bath before you go to bed.
• Read for a bit before going to sleep.

While I certainly agree with these tips, they are completely unrealistic for those of us who have to actually work and take care of others.

Unless you are an independently wealthy health nut, these types of things are just not going to happen on a regular basis. But here’s some tips:

1. Try to separate the wheat from the chaff. While we may not be as fortunate as some millionaire productivity gurus in that we still are overwhelmed with stuff we need to do, most of us can still streamline our lives much more efficiently. Keep a time journal for a while and see where all your time is going. If it doesn’t fit well with your values, find a way to eliminate it and get to bed earlier.
2. Sleep in when you can. I think the idea that we should be sleeping until we naturally wake up every single night is pretty ridiculous. I think of it like intermittent fasting. It’s okay to go in spurts, as long as you balance things out in the long run.
3. Use earplugs and an eye mask. If I could only give you one tip to having the best sleep of your life, it wouldn’t be medication or an overly-complex pre-sleep ritual. It will only cost you a couple of bucks. Go to your local pharmacy and pick up a pair of earplugs and an eye mask. Throw ‘em on before you go to sleep, but only if you aren’t planning on doing anything important in the next 12 hours. You will wake up feeling better than you have ever felt in a morning. Trust me.

And take a good hard look at your life and see if you really need an alarm clock. Yes, most of us do, but a good chunk do it just because they feel they are supposed to.

If you think this might be you, then you might want to give an experiment like this a shot.

Trust me, it’s awesome!

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