Thirty Years of Rotating Shifts, Then a Sunrise Lamp

For thirty years I woke to a buzzer, at 4:40 in the morning on early shifts. I started at the paper mill in Green Bay at twenty-nine and retired from it thirty years later, all of it on rotating shifts, the last stretch as a shift supervisor. I retired two years ago, in the fall, at fifty-nine.

I assumed the mornings would sort themselves out once nobody was telling me where to be. They did not. For a full year I woke three or four times a night, not with anything wrong, just awake and listening to the furnace thump and the neighbor's pickup start up around five. I saw my family doctor during that year. She checked me over and found nothing that needed treatment.

So in October of last year I sat at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and wrote out five things that were waking me. Noise, light, a sore neck, overheating, and dark mornings. Everything on that list went into one Amazon order that week, my own money, and it was all set up by the end of the week. The Philips SmartSleep Wake-up Light was for the dark mornings.

The old clock is in a drawer now. It buzzed me out of bed in the dark for thirty years and it never once occurred to me to question it. What it did was wake me all at once, heart going, in a room with no light in it. That is a small thing to complain about until you do it every morning for a year after you stop needing to.

The Philips does the opposite. I set it for 6:30 and the light starts coming up at 6:00, half an hour of it, slow enough that you do not catch it happening. At 6:30 the sound comes on. I picked the birds. There are five sounds to choose from and I went with the birds the first time and never changed it. By the time my feet are on the floor the room is already a room.

By early November, the dark mornings had stopped feeling like something to get through.

I use the sunset setting a couple of times a month, not every night. The light goes down the way it came up and gives me something to watch that is not the inside of my own head. There is a tap snooze on top, which I have hit maybe a dozen times in thirteen months, and an FM radio I turned on once to see that it worked and then left alone. The rest of the time it is a bedside reading lamp with twenty brightness settings and a display that dims itself down so the numbers do not glow at you all night. I read with it most evenings.

The two week mark fell in early November. That was when the dark mornings stopped feeling like something to get through. I am not going to tell you it fixed my sleep, because it did not, and it is not built to. What it did was take the worst ten minutes of the day, the ones between a black room and a lit one, and stretch them out until they were not bad. I have been through one full winter of dark mornings with it now, and I have not once missed the buzzer.

Joyce gets up later than I do. She turns her face away from the light and goes back to sleep, and that is the whole of her opinion on it. There is one honest flaw. On a morning I sleep straight through with my sleep mask still on, the mask blocks the sunrise and the bird sound is what wakes me instead. Those two do not fully work together, and I would rather say so than pretend the lamp is doing a job it is not doing.

The other annoyances are smaller. The Philips costs more than a plain alarm clock, no way around that. It takes up a lot of nightstand, more than the old clock ever did, and mine is a small nightstand. I have not wanted to unplug it, though, and after thirteen months that is the only review that counts for much.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you are waking up in a black room and it is making you dread the morning, I would tell you what my list told me. The problem is not that you are lazy or that you need to go to bed earlier. The problem is that nothing about a dark room in November says get up, so your body argues with the alarm every single day, and you lose that argument at 6:30 and then again at 6:39. A sunrise lamp does not win it for you. It just stops the room from being on the other side.

What I would not tell you is that a lamp cures anything. I still wake around four most nights for the bathroom and I still have bad nights. I saw my doctor about that bad year and you should see yours if sleep trouble goes on, because a lamp is a lamp. What I can tell you is that after thirteen months I do not brace myself at 6:30 anymore, and for a man who spent thirty years bracing himself for a buzzer, that is a change I notice every morning.