I have reset the alarm clock. An overlooked mechanism in today’s technologically synchronized, your-phone-does-everything world, it tells the time, it wakes you up, it’s decentralized from a phone. It is awesome.
Why? Because before I brought an analog clock back to my bedroom, I averaged two hours and 56 minutes of screen time a week, and my phone told me this every Monday, moments after my alarm went off.
And every morning, while all I was trying to do was tap “snooze,” I was faced with a deluge of notifications piling up one after the other like a deck of solitaire on the screen. My phone would tell me my friends were chatty last night with 34-plus Whatsapp messages; there would be Instagram warnings and dozens of emails from multiple accounts. The notifications would fill me with anxiety and stress about the day ahead before I’d even had my morning coffee.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my old analog clock — a compact travel model — was a low-key luxury.
The design would have pale in comparison to the latest iPhones, but it did its one job very well; his punctuation and shrill shriek was effective in waking me up every morning. Coincidentally, it didn’t fill my head with chatter, bad news, and deadlines before the day had started.
Changing habits
I made the switch from alarm clock to phone about 10 years ago after telling someone I thought was a funny story about how my alarm clock once went off in my suitcase while I was in the trunk of a taxi, causing us to stop, so I could pick it up. The story was astonishing. “Do you use a real alarm clock?” they asked, as if it were a fax machine. “Why don’t you use your phone!” Oh, I thought. Why not me? I probably didn’t even know I could do that at the time. But I succumbed to peer pressure and gave up my old clock. And then ended the luxury of waking up with no notifications, and the misery of looking at it in the middle of the night when I was checking the time on my phone.
“The reintroduction of an alarm clock gives me the time, space and separation that my phone didn’t have.”
As our cell phone use continues to grow (a 2018 Deloitte report found that U.S. smartphone users check their phones 14 billion times a day, up from 9 billion in the same 2016 report), wellness experts say it’s negatively impacting our morning ritual. .
“If you wake up first, the ideal is to wake up and spend a little time in your own mind before being bombarded with everything else in the world that’s going on. Give yourself a chance to adjust to the waking world,” says Lily Silverton, mental health and wellness coach. “Historically, we’re not used to having our attention dragged away as much as we are now.”
Before alarms, it was roosters, church bells, knockers (people paid to wake you up by tapping the door or window with a long stick, which happened in industrial Britain until the 1970s) and even our own blow that got us out of bed. It is widely believed that the clockmaker Levi Hutchins of Concord, New Hampshire, invented one of the first alarm clocks in 1787. His design would only go off once at 4 a.m., his favorite time to wake up. Little seems to be known about the details of the actual design, but he wrote: “It was the idea of a clock that could sound an alarm that was difficult, not the execution of the idea. It was the simplicity itself to make the bell to sound at the predetermined hour.” Hutchins never patented or manufactured this clock.
It was years later, in 1874, when French inventor Antoine Redier became the first person to patent an adjustable mechanical alarm clock. And in 1876, a small mechanical winding clock was patented in the US by Seth E. Thomas, prompting major American clockmakers to start making tiny alarm clocks. Reportedly, German clockmakers soon followed suit, and by the late 1800s, the electric alarm clock had been invented.
5 Things We’re Still Doing Wrong About Sleep, According to an Expert
Buy clocks
Today, alarm clocks come in any number of designs. From riffs on the Panasonic RC-6025 clock radio, immortalized in the 1993 film Groundhog Day, to more retro designs from classic brands like Roberts. A quick search on Etsy reveals new designs in the form of robots, owls, or even rabbits.
Elsewhere, there are more modern designs like the addition of colored night lights, projectors (to project the time onto your ceiling or wall! No thank you), speakers with USB ports, temperature and humidity controls, and even teen-proof bed shakers.
Last year, the late Virgil Abloh’s Off-White label teamed up with Braun to release a pair of sleek limited-edition alarm clocks. In orange and blue, the design is based on the brand’s classic BC02 alarm clock which, remarkably simple, was originally conceived in the 1980s by Dieter Rams and Dietrich Lubs. Fashion brand Paul Smith also released its version of the clock in 2020.
However, all I was looking for was a simple alarm clock, just like my original. And I got one from the local home improvement store for £8.50 (just over $10). The first night I used it, I felt strangely aroused when I physically wound the setting instead of swiping on a screen. The next morning, in somewhat anti-climax, I woke up before the alarm clock. But I already felt like I had conquered the day, instead of chasing it.
According to Silverton, “technology takes advantage of our psychological weaknesses.” And being connected, she noted, is unbelievable but terrible at the same time. “It manages that and creates a routine that works for you.”
What I think I have now. The reintroduction of an alarm clock gives me the time, space and separation that my phone didn’t have. While my phone is still next to the bed, the difference is that it’s no longer the first thing I reach for. My first expression of the day is no longer slandering an email and feeling my blood boiling, I find myself carefully considering what to have for breakfast. That gave me a sense of control and peace. Oddly enough, it has made me feel younger – I assumed because the experience feels nostalgic, or maybe because I sleep better. And what could be more luxurious than that?