The Alarm Clock That Replaced the Buzzer at 4:45

For years my weekdays started with a noise I hated. Not loud, exactly. Just sudden. At 4:45 the phone on my nightstand would go off two inches from my ear and my whole body would brace like someone had slammed a door. I am 58 and I have been getting up at 4:45 for most of my adult life, so you would think I would be used to it. I never was.

The job makes it worse. I am a building maintenance supervisor at a hospital in Clifton, New Jersey, and my shift starts at 6. That means I am awake before the streetlights on our block turn off, and the bedroom is pitch dark because Linda needs it dark. She is 56, a school librarian, and the lightest sleeper I have ever met.

So the buzzer was a problem twice. It jolted me and it woke her. About a year ago I replaced it with a JALL sunrise alarm clock, a small round thing that sits on my nightstand on the side away from the white noise machine. The idea is simple and I had heard it before and dismissed it as a gadget. It lights up gradually before the alarm time, then makes a soft sound at the end instead of starting with one.

I want to be careful not to oversell it, because the first week was not magic. What the JALL clock actually did was smaller and more useful than magic. It removed the jolt. By the time 4:45 came around, the room already had light in it and I was already closer to the surface. When the sound came, it was the second thing that happened instead of the first.

By the time 4:45 came around, the room already had light in it and I was already closer to the surface. The sound was the second thing that happened instead of the first.

The reason I am writing this down is that Linda noticed before I did. About three weeks in she said I had stopped doing the thing where I sat on the edge of the bed for ten minutes with my head in my hands. I had not noticed. I just knew I was getting downstairs and out the door without that fog in front of my eyes.

Her side of it matters more than mine. The light faces my side of the room, and she sleeps through it most mornings. Not every morning. On the nights when I have rolled over and knocked the thing around, she has seen the glow, and she has told me so with a certain look over her coffee. That is the honest trade. The light is gentler for me, but it is still light in a room she wants dark, and it only stays invisible to her because of where it points.

A few practical things I learned over twelve months, in no particular order. The JALL has weekday and weekend alarms set separately, which matters if you get up at 4:45 five days a week and want to sleep in on Saturday without resetting anything on Friday night. There are 25 nature sounds plus FM radio, and the sound side of it is decent rather than remarkable. I use a low one and I could not tell you which. The sleep timer runs from 10 to 480 minutes, and I used it in the summer when the bedroom ran warm and I needed something to fall asleep to that was not my own thinking. Snooze runs 5 to 20 minutes, if you are the type who uses snooze.

It is 1.2 pounds and about 7.2 inches across the face, on a round body with an LED display, powered by USB, and it sits flat on a tabletop. Mine has not moved in a year. The single AA battery holds the settings when the cord gets pulled, which happened once while I was vacuuming, and I was glad of it. The sound steps down low enough to be usable in a dark room, though I had to go hunting through the 17 light modes to find the one I wanted.

What I would say against it. The brightness at the end of the cycle is brighter than I want in a dark bedroom at 4:45, and I turned it down. The controls took me two evenings with the little manual before I stopped looking things up, and there are more options on this thing than I will ever use. And if you are someone who needs to be shouted awake, this will not shout. I do not need to be shouted awake anymore. That is rather the point. If you genuinely sleep through everything, a slow light will not fix that on its own.

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

I would tell you that the clock was not the change. It was the fifth change. Three years ago I was sleeping maybe five broken hours a night and nodding off in the hospital parking lot before a shift, which scared me badly enough to do something about it. I bought a white noise machine first, for the bus route. Then a sleep mask for the streetlight coming through the blinds. Then Linda got a cooling pillow because she runs warm, then I got a weighted blanket because my mind would not stop at 2 a.m., and last came this clock. Each one was small. None of them fixed everything.

I would also tell you the part that is not about gear at all. My doctor sent me home with a sleep apnea test a few years back, because I snored and Linda had heard me stop breathing in the night. It came back negative and I was relieved. If you snore hard enough that someone in your house has noticed a pause, get the test. No clock on a nightstand does anything for that, and I am not a doctor, so go ask one.

And I would tell you what to expect, honestly. The first four or five mornings you will notice it. After that it becomes the way the room works, which is the highest compliment I can pay a piece of bedroom equipment. Nothing in that room announces itself anymore. That is what I wanted. I wanted the morning to start at a slope instead of a wall.