The dawn simulator alarm clock has to be one of the best advances in everyday application technology in the last 50 years. This newest type of wake-up machine actually helps us solve one of the age-old problems that people who have to wake up to an alarm clock have had. Enter the newest boon to us winter-time sleepyheads–a dawn simulator alarm clock that wakes you up naturally and gently in the dark morning hours before the real sun has risen.
For a long time the winter blues were just something one had to accept and cope with, but that was before the discovery that what we used to call the “winter blues” is actually, in many cases, seasonal affective disorder (SAD). This discovery went a long way toward explaining depression and the tendency to isolate oneself in the winter time, debunking the idea that the behavior was just your personality.
Until the last 20 years or so, it wasn’t widely known that people experienced these symptoms for reasons other than the cold weather outside.
Symptoms that include: * Disrupted sleep cycle ~ waking once or multiple times through the night, and/or having trouble getting (back) to sleep. * Sleep deprivation ~ which also makes you want to eat more sugar and carbs, and slows down your metabolism at the same time. * Feeling tired to exhaustion almost every minute of the day. * Feeling sad, empty, depressed ~ which in some severe cases can go from bad to worse. * Despair that sits like a water soaked pillow in your chest, feeling so sad that you can hardly breathe. All of these symptoms and more may occur, with no discernible outside trigger, except one: light deprivation.
The truth is, the way you react to to the coming of autumn and winter and the shorter periods of daylight is not just an emotional or psychological problem, and it is not because you have a personality quirk. People who have SAD suffer a physical affect to lowered exposure to sunlight as well as an emotional one. They aren’t “moody” or “blue.” What they are experiencing, in many cases, is a recognized and diagnosable physical condition that causes a glitch in their brain’s signals to the nervous system.
There’s at least one “cure” for light deprivation–and it isn’t more cowbell.
The technology now exists to easily solve a multitude of these emotional and physiological issues that result from the scrambled signals the brain sends and receives during the autumn and winter.
So if you suffer from light deprivation in the winter; if you get out of bed in the morning darkness feeling like someone has beaten you with a tired stick all night; if you don’t feel really awake until you’ve been up for an hour or two and had your morning coffee; if you tend to snap at people foolish enough to talk to you or even breathe the same air you do before that morning cup of coffee–if any or all of these conditions apply to you, I’m betting that a dawn simulator alarm clock might well become your new best friend.
Before you buy anything online, skim through Rebecca Reynolds excellent web review of dawn simulator alarm clocksand the features of a dawn simulator alarm clock.