Your choice of alarm contributes to that
weighed-down feeling you get in the morning.
Every morning my
alarm goes off. And every morning, without fail, I hit that snooze button —
hard.
I’ve always chalked
this up to not being a morning person. After all, there are many others who
abuse the snooze button as egregiously as I do. However, according to science,
I might be placing too much blame on myself. The harsh sound of my alarm could
also be to blame for my morning malaise.
The type of alarm you use may affect your morning alertness
The current study was
published in the journal PLoS One and suggests that using a
melodic alarm in the morning, rather than a jarring beep-tone, may help
individuals feel more alert.
For the study, a
group of Australian researchers recruited 50 people and asked them to fill out
an anonymous questionnaire. They asked what type of sound they preferred to
wake with, how they felt about that sound, and how alert or groggy they felt
upon waking.
Scientists discovered that more musical-sounding alarms
helped people feel more awake and alert in the morning.
The scientists
discovered that more musical-sounding alarms helped people feel more awake and
alert in the morning. Using a melodic alarm tone helped focus the brain’s
attention and reduce grogginess.
Meanwhile, a
traditional alarm clock (such as one that repeats a single note abrasively) can
induce sleep inertia —
which is a term for the grogginess people often feel upon waking. The same goes
for an alarm that’s set to a talk radio station or a recording of someone
telling you to get the hell out of bed. As much as you might hypothetically
like those alarms, they’re not doing good things for preventing that
weighed-down feeling you might experience in the morning.
Sleep inertia, along
with tempting us to pound the snooze button, more crucially impairs our ability
to think, remember and react.
Drawing conclusions
Though this study is
potentially useful for people like emergency responders or airline pilots (who
are required to be fully functioning upon waking), there are still several
drawbacks.
Limitations-wise, the
study only used a small sample of people. The authors didn’t screen for any
sleep disorders. And there were no controls. Further research must be done to
figure out what this data truly means. However, there’s no harm in
experimenting with a melodic alarm substitution in the meantime. I, for one,
will be waking up to classical music tomorrow morning.
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