5 ms·
I discovered when I was in my late teens that given a week or two of the same daily alarm, my subconscious would eventually recognize the sound as my alarm and
by raamdev 10y ago
I discovered when I was in my late teens that given a week or two of the same daily alarm, my subconscious would eventually recognize the sound as my alarm and I'd get up, walk across the room, turn it off, go back to sleep and wake up an hour or two later with absolutely no recollection of turning it off. I eventually discovered that using my phone as an alarm, with my call ringtone as the alarm sound, was the only way to trick my brain into forcing me awake: my subconscious has no way of knowing if it's an actual phone call that I need to be awake for or if it's just the alarm, so it forces me awake to figure that out. Its worked for years now.
- ep103 10y agothis is... genius
- kctess5 10y agoMaybe it can backfire and you'll subconsciously silence your cell phone during actual calls.
- degenerate 10y agoCertain apps curtail the "turning alarm off and going back to sleep without realizing it" problem. Sleep as Android has a feature where you need to perform a conscious task (math problem / tap on X jumping sheep / etc). Sure you might still solve the math problem and go back to sleep, but there is no doing multi-operational math subconsciously. You're going to know you are awake and will remember.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoYou'd be surprised. I tried the multiplication of two-digit numbers puzzle and very quickly I became pretty proficient at solving math problems in a semi-conscious state...
- squeaky-clean 10y agoI've had trouble getting up and staying awake forever. I was terrible in my teens, my parents would actually throw water on me some mornings. Now I use an alarm app (Sleep As Android, I'm sure there are others) that can choose different puzzles and difficulties. To turn off the alarm, I'd have to solve 3 problems like "2x5+14-6" without getting any wrong. I eventually got really good at doing math in my sleep apparently, because I overslept a few days after about a year of using it. Later finding that my alarm was in the solved state. Now I use the mode that makes you physically shake the phone a certain number of times (and a certain amount of force) to turn off the alarm. I have it set so it takes about 20 seconds of vigorous shaking, and by the end of it I'm fairly awake. I did the ringtone thing for a bit and it just made me really hate my ringtone. I would never hear my alarm and go "maybe someone is calling", but I would always hear my ringtone and go "Wtf, why is my alarm app...? oh..."
- raamdev 10y agoI think working for a few years in IT roles where I was on call 24/7 in case a server went down, where I worried that any call I got might be a disaster call, trained my brain to always consider the sound of my phone ringing as a possible emergency. I've been using the iPhone "Old Phone" ringtone for years now and when my alarm goes off I usually catch it by the first or second ring (confirmed by people who have actually called and woken me up). One other thing I've learned is that if I use an ascending alarm, where the ringtone starts quiet and slowly gets louder, it takes a lot longer for me wake up, presumably because my subconscious learns that an ascending ring is most likely not a phone call... my wife and daughter are awoken long before me if I use an ascending alarm, but if I just use a normal one I'm able to wake up and turn it off before it wakes them.
- digi_owl 10y agoHeh, had a similar experience with an alarm clock with a button i needed to twist to lock in place.
- dvtv75 10y agoSprinkling carpet tacks on your floor would have cured that one.