I just don’t sleep well at all these days, and I usually don’t bother setting the alarm, because I’ve found that I’m almost always up, and wide awake, close to 3 hours before it goes off.
If there is an important matter that I must attend to, I will set the alarm, just in case, as I have been known to get sleepy all of a sudden, and go back to bed. But, that doesn’t happen very often at all.
Once I get any amount of sleep (usually 4 hours, or a little more), and I wake up, I’m good to go for the next 20 hours or so.
I’ve also found that taking a nap screws me up horribly, so I try to avoid those, if at all possible.
If a nap is involved, and I’m actually sleeping, then I must set the alarm.
I wake up automatically. I first discovered this when I started waking up minutes, and sometimes, literally seconds before my alarm clock would go off. I remember one day, opening my eyes, seeing the alarm clock right away, and then it went off. I no longer use an alarm clock. I also have a job where I can just kinda stroll into work anywhere between 8am and 9:15am and noone gives it a 2nd thought.
That said, I also seem to have this horrible curse of never, EVER being able to sleep through the night. I usually wake up anytime between 3 and 5am and can’t get back to sleep for about an hour. It’s quite exhausting when I try to get to the gym in the morning. So I can wake up whenever I want, but I can’t seem to keep myself sleeping. Maybe my internal clock sometimes gets confused and freaks out, thus waking me up, knowing I don’t have an alarm clock set to wake me up if I need to be?
Not only do I do that, but I have to move it occasionally or I’ll sleepwalk over and turn it off, then go right back to bed. When I’m asleep the alarm is just noise and I want it to stop! I have to wake up enough to realize that the noise is my alarm and I need to be up.
This. My daughter is pretty well indoctrinated now that she can’t come into our room until there is a seven on her (digital) clock. She usually even remembers that the seven has to be the first number.
On the rare occasions when she oversleeps, I do usually wake up by 7:30 at the latest.
I haven’t needed an alarm clock since my early twenties (I’m 42). I also wake up within a few minutes of the time I set on said clock (just to be sure). Doesn’t matter what time - two AM or six AM. Doesn’t matter if I’d had a few too many. FWIW, I worked third shift for about five years, and my perceptions of time shifted somewhat. Morning and night didn’t really have much meaning for me. Also, my father has told me he reacts the same to wake-up time. Gets up a few minutes before; always has.
Definitely need an alarm. I shut myself in my apartment once for about 3 weeks with the curtains pulled tight, and discovered that if left to my own devices I’ll adjust quite nicely to a 32-hour day. However, the damn earth rotation doesn’t seem to want to play ball, so until it does I’m stuck with never quite getting enough sleep.
Aside from the sleep apnea, that’s pretty much me. I took a year off during college because I couldn’t get my sleep patterns under control enough to function. I still struggle, but my husband is good at keeping me accountable. Without him, I’d probably shut off my alarm and go back to sleep at least once a week.
My “natural” alarm usually works quite well. (Too well, in fact–sometimes wakening me earlier than needed.
But I need the clock radio as backup for when the natural alarm malfunctions. The local Pacifica station is pretty good–the one day of the week I need to get up really early, there’s a Death Metal show!
I need one on Mondays, because I have to get up at 5am instead of my normal 8am. I have a horrible time falling asleep for the last year or so now, but regardless of what time I fall asleep, I’ll still wake up at 8. I work evening shift at a stressy job; it takes quite a while to settle after work. It also doesn’t seem to matter if I take medicine to sleep - Benadryl, or I have a prescription for Restoril that I occasionally use. I still wake up just fine - groggy, but awake.
I can tell myself to get up earlier - 6 or 7, and it almost always works. 5am seems too much for me to adjust to. I’ve been able to do this since I was about 30. Before that - I definitely needed an alarm.
My schedule for Monday changed 6 weeks ago now. I’m finding that my body is trying to wake up early, but hasn’t figured out what time 5am is yet. Today I woke up at 2. (I fell asleep at 9.) I have 22 more 5am Mondays - I’m curious if my body eventually adjusts on its own, and if it does, what it will do. I will thank it if it doesn’t wake me at 2 again; I am going to be really really grumpy come this evening.
I have two furry alarm clocks, but unfortunately they don’t come with a snooze function and often wake me up a couple of hours earlier than I’d like.
I’d be screwed without my real alarm clock, actually. I just haven’t been able to program myself to wake up at a preset time earlier than 8:30am, but for work I need to wak up anywhere from 6am to 7:30am depending on which office I’m travelling to and whether or not an 8am meeting has been scheduled.
I bought a tape alarm clock just so I could wake up to “Wake Up, It’s 1984” by Oingo Boingo, which starts off with increasingly enthusiastic calls of “Wake up, won’t you listen to me?”
But after a few times, my mind was trained so that I woke up when the tape machine started, and I’d hit snooze or stop the alarm, defeating the purpose of the invigorating daystart song.
This. I can get up by myself at 4:30am to go fishing on Saturday morning, but I could sleep until 10am or so on work days so I need the clock.
It also helps that if I were using the alarm clock on those fishing Saturdays that my girlfriend would most likely brain me to death with said clock, so there’s incentive for my internal alarm to work.
I used to rely heavily on the alarm clock (and the snooze button,) but for the past couple of years I have a bedmate that helps to regulate my sleep. Amazingly, I find that if I lie down >6 hours before I need to wake up, I am able to wake up unaided.
The snooze button/alarm is a great invention. There’s something satisfying in that twilight state you drift into after the first alarm goes off and you know another one’s coming.
I’ve been self-employed (at home) for the last decade, so I don’t have to be up at any particular time. This is great, because I’ve always been a night person and I can now live my natural sleep pattern. Before, having to get up early when I worked in an office was always a pain, and I often had to go to work on 5 or 6 hours sleep.
Now I go to bed between 1 and 2 am (after at least part of Craig Ferguson and some reading in bed) and get up around 9 or 9:30 without an alarm clock.
Occasionally I can’t drop off, and I’ll be up until 3 or 4. That was very stressful when I had to get up before 7. Now, it doesn’t bother me. I just eat something and read until I’m sleepy. I go back to bed and I’ll still wake up naturally no later than 10. I’ll be a little tired during the day, but I’ll catch up the next night, no problem.
On those rare occasions when I have to get up earlier, I set the alarm, but as many others have reported, I’m often awake just before it goes off.
For the last several years I find I partially wake up a few times several hours before I have to get up. This is mildly annoying. I don’t stress out about it, but I wish there was a way to sleep without waking three or four times between 6 am and 9 am.
I haven’t had an alarm clock for years. The time that I wake up in the morning is much earlier in the summer with the earlier dawn than I do during the winter, but in any event, on work days even in the winter, I’ll be awake by 6:30.
Due to a disorder filed under the broad heading of “narcolepsy” I have essentially no internal clock and my REM sleep cycles are wildly erratic, meaning that if I went to bed now without setting my alarm clock I might wake up in 2 hours or in 9 hours or in 16 hours and all have happened on many occasions. A medication called Provigil helps but is expensive (about $10 per tab) but my new insurance company is giving me a hassle about paying for it, thus I’m back to setting three alarm clocks and my cell phone, though I have slept through all four of them on numerous occasions.
