Sarah, founder
I know how this is going to sound. Just hear me out.
I stopped setting an alarm about a year ago. Not because I read a wellness article about it, and not because a book told me to. I stopped because for three weeks in a row, I had been waking up seven or eight minutes before my alarm went off, staring at the ceiling, waiting for it. Every morning I was lying there in bed listening for a sound I didn't need. I got up on the twenty-second morning of doing this and I turned the alarm off, and I haven't set it since.
I want to be honest about what this looks like in practice, because when people say I don't set an alarm anymore it can sound like a flex. Like they've achieved some kind of enlightened state where their body just knows. That is not what's happening at my house. What's happening is that Juno is deeply invested in the concept of breakfast, and she has a very reliable internal clock, and she comes and sits by the side of the bed at around 6:15 every morning and stares at me until I get up.
She doesn't bark. She doesn't nudge. She just sits there and stares. If you have never been stared at by a golden retriever with a serious need for breakfast, I can tell you it is an experience that combines patience and pressure in a way I have not been able to reproduce with any human alarm system.
So I get up. And what I noticed, after a few weeks of getting up like this instead of getting up to a phone screaming at me from the nightstand, was that my mornings had changed. The first thing my body registered was not stress. It was a dog. Which sounds like a small distinction, but it turns out it isn't.
I read something recently about how the sound of a phone alarm activates the same part of the brain that responds to threat. Whether that's true in a rigorous scientific sense, I don't know. I can only tell you what my body reports. When I woke up to an alarm, I woke up ready to defend against something. When I wake up to Juno, I wake up ready to feed someone I love.
The rest of the day is different because of that. Not dramatically. Just at the margins. I'm slightly less irritable. I answer emails with more patience. I take the walk without checking the time. I sleep about the same number of hours, though I go to bed earlier now, because I'm not staying up to squeeze in the last things.
I want to be careful here not to prescribe this. Some people have jobs where they have to be somewhere at a fixed time, and the dog and the internal clock aren't going to cut it. Some people have kids, which is its own kind of alarm system, one that arrives less predictably than mine. Some people just don't have the option, and I don't want to make anyone feel like they're doing it wrong.
What I want to say is this. At some point most of us started letting the phone tell us when to be alive. It tells us when to wake up. It tells us when to check the news. It tells us when a meeting is starting, when a friend has messaged, when a package has arrived. It tells us when to go to bed. It tells us when to breathe, if we have the right app.
And a lot of us are tired.
I'm not saying throw out your phone. I'm not saying live like a monk. I'm saying that there is a version of the morning that doesn't start with a piece of machinery telling you that a new day has begun. There is a version where the day starts because you woke up. There is a version where the first thing you notice is a golden retriever with breakfast on her mind, or the sound of rain, or the fact that your partner is already up in the other room making coffee.
That version is available to more of us than we think. It requires giving up a little bit of control, or trading one kind of control for another. In my case, I traded the alarm on my phone for the alarm sitting at the foot of my bed with a wagging tail.
It's summer now. The light comes in through the window earlier than it did a few months ago. Juno adjusted. So did I. We're on some version of California time that isn't on any clock, but it seems to work for us.
If you're thinking about doing this, I'd say try it for a week. Not as a system. Not as a wellness thing. Just as a small experiment in trusting your body to know when a day has started.
You may find, as I did, that it already knows.