What Would Happen If You Never Had To Use An Alarm Clock?
This is What Would Happen If, a close examination of mundane hypothetical situations. Each week, we look at something that you could do but probably never would, and take it to its logical endpoint. This week: What would happen if you never used an alarm clock?
After a long, fretful day dealing with life's travails, we, somehow, manage to shut our eyes and brains off long enough to find rest. And then the alarm clock goes off.
Such is the alarm clock's thrall over us that going to sleep without an alarm turned on has a delicious potential to it — that, finally, we're free to sleep.
For a large majority of us, waking up to an alarm is the norm not the exception. But what if the opposite was true? What would happen if we let our bodies dictate when we wake up, and not the machines?
To answer this, we spoke with Dr. David Rapoport, the research director at Mount Sinai's Integrative Sleep Center. What might this fantasy world of no alarm clocks and waking up whenever we want do to us? "The simple answer is it would be great for your health," says Rapoport. "It is the way we are designed."
To understand why sleeping without an alarm is good, we first need to understand why it's bad. Sleep is largely governed by two things: Our sleep cycle, a roughly 90 minute process our body goes through multiple times per night, and our circadian rhythm, the body's own internal clock that controls when we fall asleep and wake up. Greeting the morning with the shrill cry of an alarm clock has the potential to futz with both of these processes.
"An alarm clock is almost entirely a negative for most people," says Rapoport. "An alarm clock is an external cue that says 'Get up' at a time when your body doesn't want you to."
As we sleep our body goes through six different phases, starting off as light sleep, and growing deeper and deeper until you hit Rapid Eye Movement, or REM, sleep. Naturally, our bodies tend to wake us up during the lighter phases of sleep, which, coincidentally happens to be the best times to wake up.
An alarm clock, however, goes off no matter what phase of sleep you're in. And if it happens to go off while you're in one of those deep-sleep phases, you're going to feel groggy. "Waking up out of delta sleep, or REM sleep, is not the way the body is designed," says Rapoport. "You need a certain number of hours of sleep, but you also need a certain regularity and rhythm within the sleep cycle."
The alarm clock is so disruptive to our sleep patterns, that even trying to sleep in on the weekend to compensate for whatever sleep debt it's caused can make things worse. This is where the alarm clock starts to butt heads with your circadian rhythm.
"Many people deprive themselves of sleep during the week, and on the weekend they try and catch up," says Rapoport. "Your body isn't really designed to do that."
Believe it or not, your body wants you to go to bed and wake up at the same time every night. If you spend Saturday and Sunday sleeping in until 10 or 11 a.m. your body is going to expect that on Monday you'll also be waking up at 10 or 11 a.m. — despite whatever your alarm clock is set to.
"If you were in-sync with the biology you would be getting up at the same time every single day," says Rapoport. "The best way to know if you're getting enough sleep is to wake up before your alarm clock goes off."
So what happens when one manages to sleep on their own, natural, clock? Well, simply put, you would feel great. Radiant. Magical.
As for the concrete health benefits, well, Rapoport says that there's nothing conclusive on sleeping more and living longer… yet. That said, Rapoport thinks, as a medical professional, that just feeling better is pretty excellent stuff in and of itself.
"That's not a trivial thing. People tend to say 'Well we want important things like life and death and health and so on,'" he says. "But, you know, feeling good is not a trivial thing, so I wouldn't downplay it."
"Good" sleep, is sort of a misnomer. "Good" sleep is just, well, normal sleep. And, unfortunately, the forces of capitalism are steering us further and further away from a healthy understanding of sleep habits.
"We always make the plea that when people think about sleep, they think of it not as an optional thing that only the weak require," says Rapoport. "This idea that only the weak sleep, these are things that are very pervasive in our society, and they really undermine our learning about the importance of sleep."
Further Reading
The Life-Altering Impact Of A Light-Up Alarm Clock
