At least for me, getting up when the alarm clock rings used to be almost impossible and I kept staying in bed for 12 hours a day unless there was something that I absolutely had to get up in time for. Anders Sandberg’s caffeine pill trick solved that problem for me, and it has worked for over five years now:
This week I have experimented with a new way of getting up in the morning. My problem is that Anders-Sleepy has different goals than Anders-Awake, and is quite adept at resetting the alarm clock. Now I, Anders-Awake, has found a way around this self:
I set my alarm to 6:00 and 8:00. At 6:00 I go up, take a 50mg caffeine pill, and go to bed again. Then I sleep and wake up rested and energetic around 8.
In my case the time for the pill to start working seems to be 1.5 hours. A dose of one pill ensures that I wake up (but still yawning) while two pills makes me start the day much more quickly. The added benefit is of course a regular sleep schedule.
I ran into the problem of a late night one of the days, where I remained awake until 3:30. In this case I adjusted the program slightly, taking the pill at 7:00 and sleeping to 8:30, this seemed to work and the rest of the day was efficient. I became tired earlier in the evening, which was fixed by going to sleep earlier.
What works for me in addition to my equivalent of the caffeine pill is:
An alarm that gradually gets louder. It’s not even one of the traditional annoying tones, just kind of a gentle new-agey song. The key features seems to be the getting louder with time.
Putting my underwear, clothing, glasses, and the alarm at my desk, away from the bed, so that I have to get up to turn off the alarm and by then it’s not that much extra trouble to also get dressed, and I tell myself that if I’m still tired after that I can sit down at my desk, which is still better than rolling back into bed.
For me, the problem of waking up when my alarm goes off has been totally solved by using an alarm (Alarm Clock Plus for Android) which requires me to do complex mental math before it will shut off.
This doesn’t solve the related problem of getting out of bed when the alarm goes off; only waking up and not going back to sleep.
one thing that helps me with this is having set up a thing I do semi-automatically whenever I get up. Go to bathroom, check weight, go make coffee usually means I actually get up unless I’m crazy tired and don’t actually get as far as coffee making
At least for me, getting up when the alarm clock rings used to be almost impossible and I kept staying in bed for 12 hours a day unless there was something that I absolutely had to get up in time for. Anders Sandberg’s caffeine pill trick solved that problem for me, and it has worked for over five years now:
What works for me in addition to my equivalent of the caffeine pill is:
An alarm that gradually gets louder. It’s not even one of the traditional annoying tones, just kind of a gentle new-agey song. The key features seems to be the getting louder with time.
Putting my underwear, clothing, glasses, and the alarm at my desk, away from the bed, so that I have to get up to turn off the alarm and by then it’s not that much extra trouble to also get dressed, and I tell myself that if I’m still tired after that I can sit down at my desk, which is still better than rolling back into bed.
For me, the problem of waking up when my alarm goes off has been totally solved by using an alarm (Alarm Clock Plus for Android) which requires me to do complex mental math before it will shut off.
This doesn’t solve the related problem of getting out of bed when the alarm goes off; only waking up and not going back to sleep.
one thing that helps me with this is having set up a thing I do semi-automatically whenever I get up. Go to bathroom, check weight, go make coffee usually means I actually get up unless I’m crazy tired and don’t actually get as far as coffee making