Our Jack (almost always) has problems getting up in the morning, and so he gives the ‘light therapy alarm clock’ concept a whirl. Verdict? A promising idea backed up with plenty of science that doesn’t really deliver on a practical level…
What Is It?
A ‘light therapy’ alarm clock (and radio) that helps you wake up using gradual brightening and the sound of something more relaxing than your regular alarm clock. Or as they put it: ‘wake naturally with increasingly bright light’
How much does it cost?
Circa £40-60
Where is it available?
Various online retailers.
‘Jack Vs. Mornings’ AKA ‘You Can Win The Battle But You Can Never Win The War’ AKA ‘This World Was Not Made For Night Owls But I’m Trying’
Someone once said ‘the early bird gets the worm’ and everyone’s been suffering for it ever since :3
Like a good proportion of the UK I am not good at getting up in the morning.
Having spent about a year working from home, I had reverted further back into ‘owl hours’ and forgotten how exactly to wake up at a ‘reasonable’ time (and who said being woken with a jolt every weekday morning was ‘reasonable’? Fuck…)
Anyway, getting a new ‘office hours’ type gig, and being sick of being shocked into ‘wakefulness’ every weekday meant I was EXTRA open to exploring alternatives to the early morning abruptness/terrorism/cortisol blast that is my Galaxy S5’s alarm clock (which somehow manages to be both jolly and terrifying at 0730 in the morning).
Enter the WL30 ‘dawn simulator’. AKA German design is CHUNKY design.
How does it work?
I had been interested in this idea for a while. In a nutshell, with this kind of alarm clock, you still wake up before your body wants to (it’s an alarm clock after all), but the transition between ‘not awake’ and ‘newly awake’ is a lot slower, and the medium of getting to ‘awake’ is much closer to ‘how they do it in nature’ (think ‘gradual’ – a gradual brightening of your surroundings, the sound of birdsong gradually rising in volume).
Basically – you wake up less stressfully and it’s an audiovisual experience.
A good idea in theory, right?
Inherently this is a very good idea indeed and is also backed by science. In using it, the good times were good times. It does deliver on the promise of being a more gentle ‘waking’ experience than your regular alarm clock.
You tend to get woken (gently) by the light first – which works quite well. The light part does seem to work by gently waking you but some people have found that it needs to be placed right by the bedside table for this to work properly (that is normally where you put your alarm clock, right?)
My favourite setting was the birdsong. Shit, it was almost relaxing.
Almost.
Call be an pessimist (I’d rather say ‘realist’), but few things really work as well as you’d like them to from the get go. This alarm is one of those things.
The Good
The concept is ironclad:
And backed by SCIENCE (biiiiiiiiiiiitch). It’s a much more pleasant, healthy way to get up in the morning. Light has a significant effect on cortisol levels and aids in increasing them – which basically helps you wake up. Seriously, if I could get this thing to work properly I wouldn’t even have my regular alarm clock turned on.
Additional features:
Has a radio too and can be used as a night lamp. It also supposedly has a night function – that helps you ‘fall asleep with increasingly dim light’, though I have no idea how the shit you access that. You can also wake up to radio instead of the dawn chorus…
The Bad
Moving = Bad:
When moved, it tends to turn itself off and reset the time I had for it. I’m not sure if this is because it was only mains powered instead of batteries, but it was basically a headache.
It seems to have done this overnight at one point, and so if I’d not had my (stressful) backup alarm set to go 2 minutes afterwards, things could have ended badly…
Doesn’t really work as advertised:
You can set the initial volume of the alarm but, unlike the light, it does not gradually get louder. Only the light increases in intensity (which defeats the point of things being gradual). The volume can be set between 0% and 100%, but it will start at whatever percentage noise level you have set, and stays that way.
Impractical interface:
The buttons could be described as…fiddly. Seriously – this is some 1970s interface shit right here. The setting of the alarm requires a lot of steps and tends to time out if you take too long. The interface is, frankly, a pain in the arse. It’s also remarkably easy to accidentally unset the alarm that you think you have just set correctly. To be brutally honest the whole process is a headache, and as I have alluded to earlier, at times it resets itself – despite the work you put in.
The Verdict
When it works, it does the job, however you can’t really count on it to actually work.
Basically, this is a very good idea which is sadly let down by poor design and execution. It feels like they rushed it out. Having had it fail multiple times to wake me in the morning I can’t really recommend it to anyone as their only alarm clock.
I would say, however, that if you can pick one up cheaply, then it’s worth taking a punt on it (with the caveat that you set a backup alarm a few minutes after this one). Basically I feel that it’s not worth how much they charge, but if you can get one cheap it’s worth giving the concept a try.
Alternatively if you’re already sold on ‘natural’ waking at this point (and if you’re not, I hope you are one day), then you might want to look for a more expensive and reliable model (and for that I can’t make any recommendations…yet)
The Details
https://www.beurer.com/web/uk/products/gentle_therapy/dawn_simulator/WL-30