I know a couple of people who can sleep through an alarm blasting away a foot from their head. It can go off for an hour or more and they are oblivious to it. I’m talking about those extremely obnoxious alarms that…hmm well I don’t know how one would spell the sound they make, but they are obnoxious.
I’ve been in the next room when in the same house as these two. I will be instantly jolted out of bed. I have to scream at them several times to wake them up. How the heck do they do it? Part of me just figures they have no discipline. What’s the real answer? What is a solution? Do they still make alarm clocks that can turn on some other appliance?
Thay only do it to annoy. If you are near enough to hear the alarm then you can be the personal alarm for them - if you’re not nearby they will leap from their beds with a joyful heart.
They enjoy having you scream at them.
The only way is to disabuse them of this notion.
The next time they have an important reason for setting an alarm creep out of the house early and let them sleep through it.
Oh yeah. This is a serious question. One of the people mentioned is my brother. He lives with me. I work nights, he works mornings. I came home and let him know he’s 3 hours late for work.
Some folks are just really deep sleepers and even a lighter sleeper can become accustomed to the sound of their alarm.
Usually, the people that are hardest to wake aren’t getting enough sleep to begin with and even if the alarm does wake them they hit the “snooze” button or spend an hour wandering the house searching for coffee and trying to determine if they’re sick enough to call off from work.
I sleep heavy most of the time and rarely hear the alarm if I sleep long enough for it to go off but I’m usually awake before the alarm especially if I know I have to be somewhere extra early.
My wife, on the other hand, wakes anytime a mouse farts in the yard.
Remote alarms?
When I was in high school my dad put a timer on my stereo (with the big 18" speakers) and had a cassette of “The Ride of Valkyrie” cued up. They still make those timers.
Hmmm, I would be willing to bet that he either stays up too late or he has a sleep disorder such as Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. There are treatments that supposedly help rest the body’s clock so you can more naturally wake up earlier. Or maybe he could to nights like you, that schedule might work better for him…
Half the time I just don’t wake up to an alarm. I think it’s because I’ve gotten so used to the sound.
Other reasons include my habit of getting up at the first ring and immediately turning it off, and sometimes just being so tired I’d rather bear the noise than move out of bed.
I am the opposite - I can wake up the exact moment that My alarm would go off if I had remembered to turn it on. Not joking.
Before I had an alarm I seemed to be able to wake up at the right time. Trouble is, it was then almost impossible to drag myself out of bed.
I am a heavy sleeper, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with how lacking in sleep I am. I have been known to sleep through people standing 3 feet away, yelling at me. Once in college, I slept through a party in my dorm room. No alcohol involved.
Having been like this for many years, I have learned that for me, the key element is room temperature. If it stays between 67-70F, I can sleep lightly. Above that, I don’t sleep well, and below that, I can hibernate with the best of them.
Also, once I am up during the day, no matter how little sleep I got before, I will almost never nap. I seem to be a high-inertia system. Wherever I am, that’s where I most easily stay.
Functionally, it feels as if my body has a more natural 26 or 27-hour clock, rather than the standard 24. So I think the best solution for me, is to find some way to abruptly adjust the rotation speed of the earth, without upsetting its angular momentum.
I’m a deep sleeper too. They way that I’ve combated this problem is to drink a glass of water before going to sleep. 90% of the time I wake up 5 minutues before the alarm, to take a piss. Very effective.
I’m a deep sleeper, too. But IMHO, it’s to with getting used to the sound of the alarm. I can sleep through my alarm with great ease, but if the phone or the doorbell rings, it’s not so easy. Last summer I experimented with having a friend (who is an early riser) ring me up each morning to get me out of bed. It worked for about a week before I got used to the sound of the phone, and started sleeping through that, too. Nowadays I need an actual live person to keep shouting at me before I get out of bed.
One thing I’ve found to be pretty effective is using the radio alarm; tune it to a station until it comes in partially clear and partially staticky (this’ll require an old-school analog tuner, not a digital one). I can easily ignore music when my alarm goes off, but music+static makes it much more jarring.
This may not help where the OP lives, because insects are crucial regionally, but my ex-fiancee could not be woken by an alarm clock, yet, if you made a reasonable imitation of a mosquito near her ear while she was sleeping… BINGO! She was suddenly wide awake!
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
I have a pretty funny video clip regarding alarm clocks and waking up but it is a bit ovr 1.5 MB and I have nowhere to host it. But is someone can host it let me know and I’ll send it. It includes an alarm which is a mechanical arm which comes out the wall with a hammer… and folding beds programed to fold at a certain time.
We’re selective to what sounds will wake us up. A mother will sleep through many loud noises and yet be wakened by her baby crying. You may not hear the alarm daily but you will hear a burglar making less noise. You can get sued to sleeping thorugh anything once you determine it is not as important as sleeping. I can sleep for hours with the alarm blasting away except when i have to catch a plane.
I wake up regularly about 5 minutes before the quarter hour.
A minute later I hear the GF clock strike the quarter hour. (Its 2 or 3 munutes fast.)
Another minute of two and the alarm goes off on the quarter hour!
Numerous studies were done that found that humans have a 25 hour natural sleep cycle (which has been challenged). I agree with the studies, because whenever I don’t have a set schedule for a couple months I seem to stay up an hour later every night.
For couple years I used one of those ringers from RadioShack. All it is, is a ringer bell in a box and it plugs into your phone line. On the other phone line (I had two) would be the modem that would dial up the other line using Fax software scheduled for whenever I wanted to get up. For snooze, I would just hit the space bar and it would cancel the call. I would have like 5 scheduled to go every morning 15 minutes apart. The software could detect when the call wasn’t picked up, so it would just try every 30 seconds until I hit “snooze” or shutdown the software. Plus shutting down the software takes effort which made it easier for me not to go back to bed. I would have had about 5 scheduled to go every morning 15 min apart. That bell was LOUD.
Waking up to a radio station with music was too jarring, but once I changed to a news station I wasn’t as tempted to hit the snooze button with my fist. Now I listen to the news items & wake up gradually.
I used to be an extremely deep sleeper (I once slept through a fire alarm in my dorm). The general cure was to switch alarm clocks every so often.
I was utterly cured of this, however, when my daughter was born. Even though she started sleeping through the night at two months, a loud cough coming from her room is now enough to wake me up.