I have been contemplating acquisition of a “sunrise simulator” lamp for a while, and finally got one yesterday. The NatureBright Per3 is more or less a bright LED lamp with a clock attached. A bit modern looking…but not too garish:
After a single day of use, I can’t really offer a review, but I can say this: I’m awake, and probably in a better mood than I normally am at this time of day.
When I first looked at the lamp in the store (a Shopper’s Home HealthCare depot) it seemed sort of anemic. But at home, in my bedroom in the cruel hours of early morning, it was plenty bright. The construction isn’t quite as flimsy as it looks, and it can rotate as well as swivel both at the base and at the lamp head: it is nicely adjustable.
As for functionality: you set a time to “wake up”, and a duration for the “dawn” up to 99 minutes. The lamp will reach maximum brightness at your “wake up” time. The simulated sunrise starts <duration> minutes early, gradually increasing in brightness until it reaches maximum at your wake up time. Interestingly, it actually *felt* like a sunrise: I even put my arm over my eyes automatically as I do in the summer. Despite my unconscious attempt to blot out the “sun”, I still woke up. And I didn’t feel mostly dead when I did.
Of course, nature itself is starting to catch up with my intended wakeup time: I should have bought this lamp months ago. I’ll write a follow up a week or two from now- if I can start entering the world in the morning a little earlier and with a bit more of a positive attitude, it will have been worth it.
Let me know how it turns out. I know I am definitely a “sunlight” person, and prefer waking up to the dawn that to an annoying alarm, and walking around permanently jet lagged.
Will do- I’ll put something up here in a couple of weeks once the “newness” is over, and I see how my metabolism deals with the change.
I have two main problems with regular alarms. Either they jolt me awake, with adrenalin pumping followed by a crash a few minutes later, or my sub-conscious tunes them out. I have a well developed reflex: my alarm clock is one of those that gradually increases the radio volume if you don’t respond quickly, and I turn it off before it actually wakes me up. It has reached the point where I have to set the second alarm (it is a dual alarm clock) to buzzer mode, and have both go off in sequence. Then I still wake up feeling like I would rather kill something and pull its still warm corpse over me as I fall back to sleep for another couple of hours.
Setting aside the alarm problems, I know I get more depressed during the winter than during the rest of the year. Waking in the dark, coming home in the dark: after a few weeks, the world seems dark and dreary, and even the sunny days don’t reset that mood.
All I know at this point is that the sunrise simulation woke me up without an alarm today, and that I didn’t feel groggy: today is only one day, though. The novelty is certainly at work, and it will take several successful wake-ups in a row to convince me of anything.
Pingback: Kelly’s World- A View into the mind of Uber Geek, Kelly Adams » Blog Archive » Observations after a week of waking up to the (simulated) sun