The Simple Gift of Light #3
Would you like to wake gently each morning, refreshed and ready for the new day? Light can help you.
A few years ago I caught some kind of nasty cough, the kind that gets worse when lying horizontal (so much for sleep), and it just wouldn’t go away. For months. This happened in March 2020, which meant seeing a doctor was next to impossible as we all tried to figure out how to handle the Covid-19 pandemic. I was stuck.
Instead of making my partner suffer every night, I moved into a spare room in the basement, completely devoid of natural light. Sleep was awesome, it was so dark and quiet. But waking up was next to impossible.
Around the same time I purchased two Casper Glow lights and put them to use. Every night they gradually dimmed to ease my body to sleep. They also promised to wake me up without an alarm clock.
Huh.
Using the app, I set a wake time of 5:30am. I was pretty skeptical, so I set my traditional alarm clock for 5:35am. I went to sleep.
The next morning, I woke up gently and glanced at the clock: 5:28am. Sadly, that’s not how I woke up this morning.
It can be informative, entertaining, and inspiring to wade through history looking at our ancestors’ relationship with light, but at 5:30am this morning the first conscious thought of my day was “turn that thing off quickly before it wakes my partner.” Alarm clocks quickly wipe out our dreams and call us to begin a new day with all the subtlety of a bulldozer in your bedroom.
And what do I loathe almost as much as waking to daily panic? Monthly subscription fees. Surprisingly, subscriptions were a necessity over a hundred years ago for many urban dwellers who paid “knocker-uppers” to walk by their homes and bang on the windows early in the morning. But it wasn’t always this way.
Rising at a precise, predictable moment each day was both impractical and relatively unnecessary for much of human history. When no one had their own clock, no boss could count you as late to the office, at least with any reasonable accuracy. Around 150 years ago, the industrial revolution took hold and most of us moved off the farms and into the cities, trading workdays dominated by outdoor activity to shifts inside factories (and eventually offices). We moved to a system of pay-by-the-hour that created a need for accurate timekeeping. In larger factory towns, knocker-uppers charged fees for their wake-up calls; church bells and town clocks were often the primary timekeepers for an entire community.
Then alarm clocks were invented, rising in popularity in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, and many of us use some variation today. There is a long trail of worn-out alarm clocks in my wake, from simple digital clocks to radio alarm clocks (maybe it will be nice to wake to whatever is playing on the radio!) to the digital watch I wear each night today. I even had an alarm clock with a remote snooze button in college; that was a terrible idea. More on snoozing in a minute….
It turns out that humans have been trying to control time for a very long, er, time. Plato famously used a water clock that would emit a noise at 4:00am each morning so he could rise for lectures, but I suspect most humans woke the way our bodies were designed to wake: with light.
Yes, I am saying that light is how humans knew it was time to wake up. And the internal biological mechanisms our ancestors used are still active in us today. Want an easy experiment to find out for yourself? Go camping in a tent and try sleeping past sunrise.
Our eyelids block out light, but not all of it. We can sense changes in light even with our eyes closed. Try closing your eyes and then covering them with your hand. If you are in a bright room, your hand will darken your eyelids, and you will be able to tell. In a dark room, passing a flashlight over your closed eyes will be just as obvious.
Why don’t our eyelids block out all light? We know that darkness is necessary for deep sleep (more on that in a future post), but our eyes need to let light through to trigger our internal clock. If you want to sound sophisticated, drop suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) into casual conversation. The SCN is a small region on the brain that functions as your body’s internal master-clock, often known as circadian rhythm. We will likely talk about the SCN, or at least its circadian rhythm functions, in nearly every post in this thread. Today, we are only concerned with waking up.
Here’s how it worked for our ancestors: they slept in near total darkness. The body’s internal clock (the SCN) dialed up their light sensitivity as morning approached, so that the lightening sky of dawn sent signals through their closed eyelids into their brain, which further increased alertness. Since dawn is a slow, gradual process, the brain processed ongoing changes and gentle increases in light, moving our ancestors through various sleep cycles until they woke up, just as gently as the dawn itself.
A funny image just popped into my head that might make a good cartoon. What if it was dark night and then the sun rose, instantly, like toast popping from a toaster? Bam! Oh…that is what alarm clocks do. That’s a bit like jumping into a swimming pool in classic belly-flop style. You will accomplish the task of getting into the pool, but it will hurt.
We do not have to wake up that way.
I made up the chart above, so please do not use it in a legal case or for a school science project. While its technical accuracy is dubious at best, it does describe what many of use experience each morning – and what we could experience if we let light wake us gently instead.
Here’s how I woke up this morning, with a little more detail:
- I was deep asleep, my bedroom darkened by blackout shades that are great for deep sleep but block out the soft early light of dawn, depriving my body of natural signals.
- Regardless of sleep phase, my watch began beeping precisely at 5:30am, jolting me instantly away with a panic response.
- If I just so happen to be in a light sleep phase or REM sleep, I might pop out of bed ready for the day.
- If, however, I happen to be in a deep sleep phase, my body will feel groggy and I will resist getting up. Perhaps I will hit snooze on my watch and fall back asleep, so quickly and deeply I might not even realize that my alarm sounded at all (yes, it happens to me on occasion).
- If I snooze, my alarm will sound again, repeating the process (and hopefully it will catch me in the right phase).
- I get up and then do something to get my energy going – drink coffee or through sheer force of will get myself out for a run.
- Gradually I will wake up.
Here’s how I could have woken up this morning, if I had been in a tent:
- I am deep asleep in the darkness.
- While I continue to sleep peacefully, early dawn light passes through my eyelids and my body moves into a lighter sleep phase, preparing for wake.
- When the light becomes bright enough, my eyes open and I am ready for the new day, feeling refreshed.
Okay, good for me, if I am in a tent. But it also happens to be cold and rainy outside and I have zero interest in being in a tent today. So what is the alternative?
Our bodies have an internal clock capable of waking us gently every morning but only if we get the right light at the right time. So what if our job requires us to hit the road early and be at our desk barely after a late winter sunrise?
The Casper Glow lights I mentioned in the beginning work by simulating, at a very simple level, dawn and sunrise. Over about thirty minutes, the lights begin to glow brighter and brighter until my brain moves into the right sleep cycle and eventually wakes. I quit using the Glow lights because my partner does not want to wake up at 5:30am, but my adult son is still using them every day.
There are other light alarm clocks out there, though the name just doesn’t fit as there is no ‘’alarm” as part of the sequence. Perhaps they should be called “light wake gently clocks,” but that is not very catchy. Me? I’m looking forward to retirement when my partner and I can wake up when we want to and possibly use light-wake-gently-clocks, though I might get impatient and try one of the sleep masks with internal lighting that promises the same results. Smart bulbs and digital control systems can provide the same benefits using other lighting in your home – combined with color tuning or color changing lighting, you can get a pretty gentle wakeup call exactly when you want it.
If you’ve tried – and loved – any solutions, please let me know. At a couple hundred bucks a pop, I’m not going to get around to all of them.
But, knowing that I could be waking up without alarm-induced panic each morning, I am going to keep trying to get light that helps me wake gently.
Read more Simple Gift of Light posts HERE.