New alarm clock

Some of you may remember an earlier post where I mentioned the horrors of getting up in the morning! I don't think that I mentioned it, but I have an alarm clock that vibrates and goes underneath my pillow (handy for those that cant, or wont, hear the alarm clock!).

But this vibrating alarm clock was not really enough to get me up, particularly if it was dark outside and too warm under the duvet! ;-) So, what I did was I set a timer on my bedside light and that would snap to full brightness at about the time I thought I should be awake.

However, that bright light is just a bit too much of a shock to the system, in the end all I did was make sure that I was under the duvet just before it turned on or immediately flang the duvet over my head as soon as the light came on. Which clearly wasn't helping!

Yet....I had an ace up my sleeve! I had heard of an alarm system called the bodyclock, made by a firm called Lumie. (they do a lot of lights for SAD people - and I don't mean it in quite that way!). After doing a bit of research, I decided that it would be worth getting one, so I bought one last weekend and have been using it for the last few days.

The premise is that you set the time for getting up and the light will gradually lighten until it gets to a suitable brightness for getting up (not mega bright, but a good light). So it is a nice and gradual waking up instead of a violent jerk into awareness when the bedside light turns on!

And I have to say, so far so good! Of course, I still don't want to get up, but I am more awake in the mornings and actually get up slightly earlier! A rather nice function that is has is that you can also set it to do a sunset, it is a bit unecessary though, but it is quite soothing to turn the main light out and then set the sunset going and gently drift off to sleep!