I Hate Alarm Clocks. But I Love Waking Up With Smart Bulbs.

You know those people who refuse to wake up, even after hitting snooze a dozen times? I’m one of them. In fact, when an alarm goes off, I double down and refuse to get out of bed. For years I thought something was wrong with me. I thought I was a lazy person, and therefore a bad person.

When I got rid of my alarm clock and started using smart bulbs as an alarm instead, I realized none of that was true. I use Philips Hue bulbs, which Wirecutter also recommends, and between 5:45 and 6 every morning, they gradually brighten. I wake up somewhere in that 15-minute period and climb out of bed. This is a complete change from my decades-long habit of refusing to budge. I’ve come to believe that it’s not only the light but also the gentle approach to waking up that have transformed my morning routine.

I feel like I’m being given a choice of how to respond. An alarm is demanding, and I don’t answer to demands, from humans or machines. I’m not alone in these feelings—people simply don’t like being told what to do. It’s also possible that the sleep-wake cycle can be influenced by light. Russell Foster, a professor at the University of Oxford, writes of discovering a “light sensor within the eye that is used to lock the body clock and the sleep-wake cycle on to the external world.” Either way, the stimulus from a brightening light doesn’t antagonize me the way an alarm does.

My alarm also contributed, I believe, to my sleep anxiety. I had some bad expectations about sleep to begin with. I thought good sleep meant sleeping soundly through the night, despite evidence suggesting that segmented sleep is normal. If only sleeping pills actually worked! But they don’t. They do not significantly enhance sleep “for the average person,” according to The New York Times. Instead, they make us forget that we wake up during the night, and so align us with our expectations, reducing anxiety. Setting the alarm just added pressure to the situation. Now you have to do everything correctly—and you’ll be timed.

So why do such miserable objects have so much staying power? It’s hard to trust a mere light, and there’s no more snooze button, no do-over. You’re accountable for getting yourself up, and accountability is sometimes tough. I haven’t yet slept through my smart-light “alarm,” but I’ll admit that I do use the alarm on my phone as a fail-safe if I have to catch a flight the next morning.

Caveats aside, I’ll never go back. For 20 years my alarm clock was an antagonistic Band-Aid to a problem, but smart lights turned out to be a real solution. They don’t tell me to wake up; they simply provide the optimal conditions under which I can choose to do so—and in that context, I always do. Fewer narratives about how I’m lazy, fewer expectations about sleep, and trust in my own good choices have rendered my alarm clock, which never got me out of bed anyway, obsolete.

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