For many people, getting out of bed is a battle against nature. Waking naturally and being woken by an alarm clock are two very different experiences.
A new Russian study suggests that the wrong alarm clock could have negative health effects.
Life Times teamed up with research and interviews experts to understand what an alarm clock can do to your body, and to teach you a few ways to get out of bed easily.
Experts questioned
Unit 1 Luxury Chunpeng, Deputy Chief physician of Internal Medicine at Huaxin Hospital, Beijing
Choosing the wrong alarm bell may damage your health
Choosing the right alarm clock is good for your health, but choosing the wrong one is bad for your health, according to a new study cited by Izvestia.
Russian sleep expert Yelena Chareva’s team asked a group of participants to set their alarm clocks to different types of ringtones, observe their mood and assess their cortisol (the stress hormone) levels through blood tests.
Experiments have found that choosing the wrong bell not only disrupts mood and makes people feel worse, it also increases cortisol levels, which has a negative impact on health. Participants who chose a “matching ring tone” based on their emotional state reported significantly better mental health.
The results suggest that choosing an alarm should take into account your state of mind at the time.
People who are depressed or unhappy: the best ringtone should be a cheerful and powerful tune;
Anxious people: Calm melodic alarms are best.
It is also interesting to note that nature sounds such as birds or waterfalls are not suitable for ringing bells because they are too soft to wake a sleeping person. This relaxing music is only good for bedtime.
Be awakened by alarm for a long time, the heart cannot stand
Waking up your alarm clock every morning not only makes your already fast-paced life feel cramped and tense, it may also increase your risk of disease.
Research shows that under the sudden sound stimulation, the body’s plant nerve system can produce stress reaction, characterized by the body to raise the level of adrenaline can increase myocardial contraction force strengthening, excitability, conduction speed, increased cardiac output, causing increased blood pressure, heart rate, at the same time increase the spirit is depressed, the risk of heart disease.
According to Shi Ming, a Sleep expert in Shanghai, loud irritant alarms can easily startle people, cause vasoconstriction, speed up the heart rate, and induce or aggravate heart disease, cerebral arteriosclerosis, myocardial infarction and other diseases. Because be awakened easily in stimulation for a long time, endocrine system is easy to disorder, still may cause menstruation to be irregular, easy to sweat.
It’s best to set your alarm to slow, soothing music, and not too loud.
It should be noted that the alarm should not be placed next to or under the pillow, but on low furniture about 1 meter away from the pillow.
Sleeping after an alarm clock rings disturbs the body clock
To make sure you get out of bed on time, you might want to set more than one alarm to make it less painful to get out of bed right away. On the other hand, you can continue to nap after the alarm goes off and enjoy a bit of oversleeping.
According to Pacific Standard, if your alarm clock has already gone off, you should not go back to sleep, which will not only lead to a bad rest, but also harm your health.
During the transition from sleep to wakefulness, breathing increases from 16 to 24 beats per minute, heart rate increases by 10 beats per minute, and brain waves increase from 8 to 30 beats per second.
When your alarm goes off, your body releases adrenaline and cortisol, which interrupts your sleep cycle and wakes you up. Once you fall asleep again, it can affect the hormone production process; If you are repeatedly woken by an alarm clock, your body clock will become confused and it will take longer to wake up.
Over time, you will wake up feeling weak, dizzy and spiritless, and this intermittent sleep is better than no sleep at all.
A study from Harvard Medical School also confirmed that setting multiple alarm clocks and repeatedly waking up before going to bed can lead to chronic fatigue.
When repeatedly woken by an alarm clock, the body secretes a compound called adenosine. Increased adenosine levels make people feel sleepier and more likely to fall into a “sleep-wake” cycle, making it harder to stay fully awake.
It is suggested that after the alarm clock rings, wait for 1 minute to gradually wake up the human body and cerebral cortex. Open the curtain or turn on the light to help wake up the body.
Set your alarm late for the night before; If you don’t feel well after the alarm goes off and you want to go back to sleep, you’d better postpone the alarm for 30 to 40 minutes.
How to wake up naturally with ease?
If you want to get rid of the alarm clock, you must adjust your body clock so that you can rest at a relatively fixed time every day, get enough sleep, and wake up naturally in the morning.
Of the several ways to wake up, natural waking is the most consistent with the body clock. In order to develop the habit of waking up naturally, you can try the following two ways:
Adjust your sleeping time
A 90-minute sleep cycle requires five sleep cycles per night to reach the 7.5 hour goal. Getting the right time to go to bed is crucial to achieving this.
Us sleep expert Dr Michael Bruce has come up with an easy and near-perfect formula: Time to sleep = time to wake up -7.5 hours.
Start with your waking hours. For example, if you have to get up at 5.30am, you should go to bed at 10pm.
Some people think it’s hard to fall asleep when you go to bed too early, but the sleep formula works for anyone who can stick to it. The key to this formula is the “wake up time”. If you can go to bed at 11pm and wake up at 6.30am for more than 10 days, your body clock will naturally adjust.
Leave a seam in the curtains before bed
Let the natural light of the next day wake up the sleeping body. Because the human body has an instinctive response to natural light, natural light is as good at waking us up as an alarm clock, and it doesn’t give us the same sudden stimulation as an alarm clock.
Additional, wake up in the morning after opening an eye do not rush get up, can appropriate “lie on the bed”, lie on the bed activity limbs and head, wait for conscious hind to sit up slowly again, stand up slowly.
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