For the past 20 days, I have been experimenting with not having my alarm turned on. Honestly, I was a skeptic when I started with it, I had some words from Alexis (@duranmla) and his experiences to guide me and ease my doubts. Now I want to share my experience.
I had my alarm set to 8:00 am, which by today standards is actually an hour that not many can have their alarm set to, I have a great schedule and situation, I don’t have to travel far to get to my job, in fact, my bedroom is just 1 door away from my office where I’m currently typing this post while sipping a cup of coffee.
I have said it many times on my podcast, I don’t even work in the morning, my workday starts at 1:00 pm, and that’s because I love the morning to do my chores and go out when most people can’t or don’t want to.
So why did I wake at 8:00 am every single day? Well… In my mind, this was the best time to just get things done and by doing so I was neglecting my body’s natural circadian rhythm. It also helps that I saw this video about why most people can’t sleep.
So I decided to give it a try, I turned off my alarm and let me tell you, the first night was brutal, it took me a while to fell asleep because I couldn’t stop thinking I would wake up really late and my dog wouldn’t have enough time to do his necessities outside my home as I trained him to do so. I’m pretty sure that night I had a light sleep because when I saw the first sun rays shining down through my window I was like “OK, it’s time, let’s get out of bed”.
I was exhausted the second day, so I went to bed a bit earlier than usual, at around 11:25 pm. I didn’t have time to think about the things I wouldn’t be able to do if I woke later than usual because I was tired, so I got a great sleep this time and woke up at ~7:30am.
At this point, I realized, to find my true circadian rhythm like the video mentioned before suggested, I needed to do a spreadsheet (yay, numbers). So I made a basic template on Notion to track a few habits I’m trying to solidify and it looks like this.
So as you can see from this extract, I have consistently been waking up between 7:30 am and 8:15 am with a few outliers where I went to be really late, but that’s not the takeaway from the exercise I’m doing, the real benefit is that I have been waking up when my body says “I’m ready to start the day” vs when I set this fictional expectation of when I want to start the day and that has made me feel better than never during my morning tasks and I have seen an energy increase during my work hours.
Will I continue after the past weeks with the experiment? The answer is yes and I will be updating you guys on the blog once I pass the 60 days mark.