Coping without an alarm clock

Being a night owl, I’d always had trouble getting up in the morning.  

One of my cousins resorted to a Heath Robinson solution back in the 60s, rigging up his radio to the alarm, but with the radio being at the other end of the room and on maximum volume, so that he had to get out of bed to get rid of the din.

My own trick during my primary and secondary school days was to move the time on the clock forward by half an hour, so that when the alarm went at 6:30am — the time I needed to get out of bed — the real time was 6am.  Very strange logic this, given that I knew in my head what the real time was.  Surely if I’d wanted to be woken up half an hour earlier than I needed to get up, to give me time to come round gradually, it’d have made more sense to set the alarm earlier rather than move the clock forward.  For some strange childish reason, my way of half tricking my brain worked well enough.

Later, I switched to something more effective, because being woken up earlier than needed meant that I’d just doze on.  What was supposed to be “just 5 minutes” would turn into an hour or, worse, longer, so that I’d end up being late.  A full bladder has its own mind and there’s no way one can sleep through an insistent full bladder.  

One year, a first year student Philip [not his real name] kept coming to class late.  When he said he needed to buy an alarm clock, I said, “You students are always skint — don’t buy one.  I’ll let you have mine on long loan, but the bladder is a very effective alarm clock, and it’s free.”   He nearly fell off his chair in surprise.

One needs to know, however, one’s own biorhythm — in this case, how long it will take a glass of water at bedtime to fill up the bladder.  If it’s 3 hours in your case, then going to bed at midnight for getting up at 4am means you’ll need to drink the water at 10pm, which makes you get up at 1am to go to the loo, then drink another glass of water for the 4am bladder alarm call.  

I know someone whose bladder sleeps through no matter how much tea she might’ve drunk before bedtime, so it doesn’t work for everyone.  Some people resent having to get up in the middle of the night to go to the loo, so it doesn’t work for them either.  I’m personally happy for my sleep to be interrupted if it means not missing a flight.

Another method which works for me is to go to bed repeatedly chanting in my head the hour at which I have to get up.  I found out (many years later, in 2007) from an ex-RAF pilot (in his 70s) that they were taught this method.  So, what I thought was my own peculiar invention turns out to be scientific enough for the RAF!