Your morning alarm rings, your eyes open wide, and frustration and annoyance dawn on you. It’s just another day, but waking up to that annoying alarm clock every morning is starting to crush your soul.
You know you have to set it or else you’ll be late. You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, but what if there was another alternative? What if you could wake up without your annoying alarm every morning?
What if you could start your day with peace and quiet. After all, we’d all love to learn how to wake up refreshed and ready to go, especially without an alarm clock. In today’s article, we’ll be exploring how you can start waking up with no alarm and why it might actually be beneficial for you!
Why waking up with no alarm could be beneficial
Our ancestors never did it, so why do we? With modern technology and the way society runs, waking up with an alarm clock has become the norm. But it could actually be harmful to some extent.
Two factors influence our natural biological sleep patterns: homeostasis and the circadian process.
Homeostasis works by making us feel more tired the longer we’re awake, and the circadian process is unique to each person, but it follows a general sleep-wake cycle. It controls many 24-hour cycles within our body, like our temperature and melatonin production.
Problems arise when our social or work cycle is different from that of our natural circadian cycle. This means waking up with an alarm often interrupts your natural sleep. When you’re awakened by an alarm rather than naturally rising you’re interrupting the melatonin sleep cycle.
Without an alarm clock, our bodies naturally wake themselves up through the dip in our melatonin levels. But when you force yourself awake with an alarm - your melatonin levels haven’t actually fizzled out and lowered yet. This is why you might feel tired and out of sync all day long afterward.
Waking up without an alarm gives your body the chance to naturally wake itself up. As melatonin levels dip, you’ll naturally wake and start your day.
How to wake up without an alarm
We can use our body's natural circadian cycle to help us awaken on time. But the first thing we need to know is how much sleep we generally need. Everybody’s different, as some people might be able to function on lower amounts of sleep compared to others.
However, understanding the sleep you need every night is crucial for developing a natural wake time. Once you’ve established the minimal hours of sleep you need a night, you have to create a routine to follow and stick to for at least a week.
Turn your alarm clock off, and go to bed at a reasonable time every night based on the hours of sleep you need for at least a week. Remember, it’s probably okay to be waking up an hour before your normal alarm rather than after. So set aside time wisely!
From there, calculate how many hours of sleep you’re getting each night. This will allow you to pinpoint the best time for you to go to bed in order to wake up naturally and on time for your day.
It’s critical that you go to bed at the same time every night and keep a routine, this will allow you to pinpoint the time you’ll wake up every day within at least 30 minutes.
Having a nighttime routine will also help you fall asleep at the same time every night. Reading a book, meditating, or even taking a crack at some of BetterSleep’s resources could help you fall asleep on time. Try anything from bedtime stories to sleep hypnosis, whatever catches your eye. Try out BetterSleep for free today!