May 20, 2021

5:32 a.m.

IMG_4806

Perhaps you're thinking that you'd like to get up and do a sunrise run but it's too hard in the lightest 3 months of the year. I hate to use an alarm clock, but maybe, like me, you have a brain that can wake itself up a few minutes before the alarm goes off. Just setting the alarm is enough to set the brain, and then you never hear the alarm. 

Another technique, and I like this better, is to sleep with the windows open and wake up when you hear the birds. How can you make your sleeping brain react to something you hear, something that's so much gentler than an alarm clock? I don't know, but try just thinking about doing that. It's worked for me lately, but only after using the alarm for a while. At first, I was waking up to the alarm. Then, I adjusted and woke up just before the alarm went off. Then, I readjusted and woke up when the birds "went off." 

This is an excellent arrangement for me. The birds seem to come on about 40 minutes before the sunrise time. That gives me 15 minutes to get from bed to car, 5 minutes to drive to my starting point, and 15 minutes to get to the place you see in my photograph... with 5 extra minutes for gazing into the sky before the sun crosses into view.

5 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

Steven writes “ I'm not a morning person. I'm a night owl. Getting out of bed in the morning is hard. I wish someone would invent something that would pick me up out of bed and put me on the floor, standing and ready to go.”

Ann Althouse said...

I have no advice for that other than just to get older. I wasn’t always like this.

Ann Althouse said...

James writes:

"Ann: Your post reminds me of one of my fellow officers who had served two tours in Vietnam, one of those way out on a forward operating base. One night he woke up in one of their slit trenches with fellow soldiers piling on top as mortar rounds were hitting the base. The only reason he could come up with that he was in the trench before the rounds hit was that he heard them leaving the tube (the propellant makes a noise), and in the few seconds before they hit, his brain had already reacted and made him get up and go to the trench."

It's hard to imagine the sleep deprivation that would be part of daily life.

Ann Althouse said...

Scott writes: "When there isn't a Seinfeld clip, a Big Bang Theory clip will have to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxjue9JcKM8"

Ann Althouse said...

Scott adds: "PS
There is a Seinfeld clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8xCpSy9em0"