Sleepyhead: A Review of Philips Wake Up Light.

Like most well adjusted adults, I hate waking up early with a passion. So called “morning people” are just high functioning vitamin D addicts. The idea that people enjoy waking up before, lets say 10 am, is completely mind boggling. What is natural is staying up late reading books or watching movies then sleeping in until your dogs wake you up with their barks of hunger.

If you haven’t caught on yet, I’m not a morning person. True story, when I was little my sister and her friend decided to play a mean trick on me. They came running into my room, proceeded to jump up and down on my bed yelling “FIRE! Amber, get up! The house is on fire!” Any normal child would get up and follow the emergency plan they spent hours practicing with their parents. Come to think of it my parents never had an emergency evacuation plan…. Way to go George and Sheils. Anyways, instead of getting up and crawling to the door to avoid smoke inhalation I told them “Go get Chris first.” Chris is my younger brother who I love very much but I assure you I did not want him to be rescued first out of love, I wanted a few more minutes of sleep.

Why am I sharing all of this? Because I want you to understand before you read the following review how much I hate getting out of bed. I’ve been working a lot of overtime recently, I’m talking 55-60 hour work weeks, and to avoid ruining my weekend I’ve been trying to get up earlier to start my work day by 730am (Don’t laugh, that’s REALLY REALLY early for me). Up until two months ago I’d been using my iPhone as my alarm clock, but it was too easy for me to grab my phone, shut the alarm off, check Twitter for any re-tweets (I’m always disappointed there are none) and go back to bed.

After deciding an iPhone was never going to get me motivated to start my day before the crack of dawn, we bought an old school bell alarm clock aka The Heart-Stopper. I put this thing on my dresser and every morning it would wake me with a heart attack, forcing me to get out of bed to shut it off. It had no snooze feature so Richard would be yelling “Hot shower! Hot shower!” so I wouldn’t get back into bed. For the most part the alarm worked but my sleep started to suffer. In anticipation of the daily 6am heart attack, I started waking up constantly before the alarm.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

My lovely friends recommended I try a dawn simulator. I bought the Philips Wake Up Light from Amazon with birthday money my mom gave me. These things aren’t cheap at a price point of $75-$100 – I better wake up feeling like I slept for hours and hours. Basically, I wanted to look like the lady on the box:

No one wakes up looking like this.

I’ve been using my Dawn Simulator for about a month now and here’s what I have to say about it.

PROS:

• I wake up every morning slowly and without a heart attack
• There is a good range of light to choose from and if you have it at the right setting, it really is a pleasure to open your eyes. I have the intensity set to Level 15/20. Any less and it takes me much longer to wake up as the room isn’t bright enough
• I truly feel better rested even if I am not getting more sleep.
• The version I bought has a “dusk simulator” which helps people fall asleep… I have no issue falling asleep so this feature is wasted on me.

CONS:

• Price – it’s expensive and if I hadn’t have been given birthday money to buy it I probably would have returned it, not because I don’t like it but it doesn’t “WOW” me enough for $100. If you can afford it or want to splurge, I think it’s worth it. If you’re on a budget – find other solutions
• Sometimes it works TOO well. Tuesday of this week I thought I *had* woken up by myself because of the sun. I woke up thinking it could only be Saturday since I didn’t wake up from an alarm. When I realized I did wake up from the Philips alarm and it was in fact 6am not 9am on a Saturday, a part of me died.
• It needs more sounds to wake up to. You can choose between birds chirping and chimes… For $100 we deserve more sounds. Nay, for $100 I want Ryan Gosling whispering sweet nothings into my ear.

Are you a morning person? Have any tips for a budding morning person like myself?

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