Shanspirations

Edited to Add: the comments by the Alaska dwellers over at Choosing Home (link below) were fascinating to me because I’ve wondered for a long time, actually, about how sleep schedules work for someone living in Alaska. I know, of course, there is great variety in how households work, but the person who wrote about the importance of dinnertime being set in order to keep bedtime regular added some insight for me. For me, living in Alaska during winters would be so challenging…I would surely have Seasonal Affective Disorder every winter! Anyway, it’s all very interesting.

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Over at Choosing Home, I had a request about the dawn simulator I recommend.  Here’s the link for the inexpensive dawn simulator that we use and have been very happy with.

There are lots of other similar products (”sunrise” alarm clocks and dusk/dawn simulator combos) out there, but this was, hands-down, the most inexpensive we could find. It only does dawn, not dusk, though, it’s very simple, and it hooks up to a regular lamp in your home.

Waking up with a dawn simulator is a gentle experience. When an alarm clock goes off it often jars you awake and you feel awful. It takes a huge effort to get out of bed, hit snooze (if you are one of those people who has to put the alarm across the room so you’ll get up:), and then go back to sleep until the alarm goes off again and the cycle starts over.

With a dawn simulator the experience is much different; you simply wake up feeling good (assuming you had a reasonable amount of sleep!).

When we sleep our bodies naturally go through sleep cycles that include light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. If you are woken at the end of a sleep cycle you feel rested, refreshed, and ready to get up. If you wake in the middle you feel awful, groggy, and disoriented.

A dawn simulator provides just enough gradual stimulation to wake you at the end of a sleep cycle, but not so much that it will wake you if you are in a deep sleep. So the simulator might go off at 6AM, but you may not reach the end of a sleep cycle until 6:30AM. With a dawn simulator you wake up at 6:30 and feel good.

Another product that we use at night is the candle lantern (the link is to campmor, but it is available at many camping stores like REI and Amazon). The idea of having open flames around Anna makes us a little nervous, so we ordered this lantern and have been very happy with it.

We can carry it around without the flame being blown by the fan, and without having to worry as much about the danger of an open flame. Just as a note, the candle lantern uses special candles designed for it. They sell both paraffin and beeswax types. The beeswax candles produce a much nicer light, smell great, and last a long time, however they leave a sticky residue that is difficult to clean out of the lantern.

P.S. My husband is the one who loves the dawn simulator the most. My favorite way to get up is when he wakes up first from the light of the dawn simulator, goes to the window, opens the blackout curtains, and floods the room with natural light for me (or sometimes I do it myself and then rest in bed several minutes longer as I start to feel ready to be up for the day). The dawn simulator wakes me up, but the natural light makes me WANT to get up. The brighter and sunnier the day is, the greater the effect for me. On cloudy days I’m more sluggish in my getting up.

Also, though, the dawn simulator always wakes me, if I did not get enough sleep the night before, I am able to go back to sleep and sleep through it a while longer.

Overall, we have found that the closer we are to following the natural time of sunrise and sunset each day, the better it goes. Since many activities in our lives keep us from doing that, we usually just go to bed the earliest we can with the schedule we have each day. The earlier we go to bed, the earlier we get up. And I love being up early in the morning now!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Health and Self-Help, Sleep and Chronobiology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.