Instead, light therapy involves you spending time each day next to a light box that is designed to mimic outdoor light, which is “important for regulating your body’s sleeping and waking cycles,” according to the Sleep Foundation. Shopping Shop with dermatologists: Silk pillowcases Sunrise clocks and light therapyĭespite the apparent connection between sunrise clocks with light-centric functions aiming to instill better sleeping habits, light therapy doesn’t include them in its orbit. “If you’re someone that takes 12 alarms to wake up, light won’t work,” Khosla said, noting the lights are no magic formula and adding that she personally likes them, for example, “but it wouldn’t work on my kid.” Related Even then, sunrise clocks aren’t for everyone. “Can we marry it to better sleep hygiene?” One easy step in that direction? Time your sunrise clock “appropriately,” Khosla advised, counting backwards from an ideal wake time to ensure you get enough hours of sleep. “People who look for stuff like this are engaging” their sleep environment, a positive sign, Kohsla noted. She believes sunrise clocks are great if operated appropriately and alongside other healthy sleep behaviors, like eating right, exercising, putting our phones away before we get in bed, and trying to turn off screens altogether long before that moment. In fact, Kohsla presented a conference session during 2020 Sleep 2020 Conference specifically about consumer sleep technology. So how does a sunrise clock help? It lights up your space gradually and slowly over time, allowing your body to react to this “natural” light and wake in tandem with it rather than get jerked out of sleep by a beeping alarm or obnoxious vibration, explained Khosla, who chairs the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Technology Committee. Seema Khosla, MD, medical director of the North Dakota Center for Sleep If you’re someone that takes 12 alarms to wake up, light won’t work. Should you grab a sunrise alarm clock? We consulted medical experts on what these devices - available from brands like Philips, Amazon, Casper and others - can do for you, as well as what they can’t. Sunrise clocks - which are not considered light therapy products - aim to simulate the rising sun, setting sun or both to help you get increasingly better and more restful sleep. Given that term’s proximity to so-called sunrise clocks, which have garnered increasing interest from Shopping readers, we looked into what buying one entails. To help combat depression, mood swings or just a general feeling of lackluster, some medical experts recommend light therapy, which comes in many shapes and sizes. On top of all this, experts agree that sleeplessness has been rising alongside Covid-19. But all the time indoors can leave you feeling cooped up, from the lack in natural sunlight to experiencing continued stress due to working from home or learning remotely.
And it allows you to change colors, fonts, and backgrounds.March marks a year into the coronavirus pandemic and while spring and daylight savings time is just around the corner, many of us are still opting to stay home. It can automatically create playlists of your favorite artist or genre. It can automatically shorten the snooze time with each time you press snooze. It can switch to a night display automatically when docking the phone. Of course, the app has all the usual features of a great alarm clock: Give it a try and I am sure you won't want to miss it anymore. If the pre-alarm wakes you up, you will be more refreshed than if you had slept until the main alarm because at that time you would have fallen back into deep sleep. The pre-alarm plays 30min before you really want to get up (you can change that). If you are in deep sleep, you will simply sleep through the pre-alarm. That's why I created Gentle Alarm which tries to wake you up during light sleep using an optional pre-alarm.Īlarm clocks can't know if you are in light sleep or deep sleep (those movement based alarm clock don't work) but they can play a very quiet pre-alarm which you will only hear if you are in light sleep. An alarm clock shouldn't shell-shock you out of your dreams.