Until age ~40 my sleep cycles were chaotic and stressful around the clock, and the morning was very stressful and sometimes (racing to work in morning traffic b

Until age ~40 my sleep cycles were chaotic and stressful around the clock, and the morning was very stressful and sometimes (racing to work in morning traffic barely 30 minutes awake) probably dangerous. I would abuse snooze alarms. I would misplace things (keys, etc) by putting them down at night and confidently making a mental note to remember. Then on the other side after sleep a complete blank and a bomb-level search under stress to find them. It didn't change until I developed a serious yearning for quality time in the morning. 'Quality' is any span where you do not have to be conscious of the passage of time (yet). First 5am and now 4:30am, the span from awakening 4:30 until 7:00 when work begins for example, was enough to impose a clean 24 hour cycle of habit. The next hurdle was that I sleep with a loud fan which helps mask environmental noise and helps me to sleep. But at 4:30am it means that the cell phone alarm would have to be very loud and I'd typically awaken apartment neighbors through thin walls who sleep in silence. I'd hear them moving around and know that I had probably awakened them. My solution was a programmable digital clock relay. At 4:30am it turns off the fan, and my mind is conditioned to awaken instantly while the fan is spinning down. Sometimes I even hear the 'click' of the relay. Then I get up quickly, because the cell phone is just out of reach and set 4:32am and I know it will be penetrating and shrill in the silence. Getting up to turn it off breaks my first level of snooze-abuse syndrome. I now (correctly) associate snooze abuse with stress and unpleasant outcomes, call it 'maturity' if you like. So now I can awaken with time to spare in 'silence' and my neighbors can stay asleep.