How the JALL Sunrise Alarm Clock Made Waking Up in a Dark Room Gentle Again

For about a year, my mornings started in the dark and I did not notice it was a problem. Then Paul and I spent one Saturday afternoon hanging blackout curtains over the one east window in our bedroom, and the room went from bright at 6:45 to almost nothing at all. That was exactly the point. The trouble was that I stopped waking up for my 6:30 walk. My body had been using the sun as a clock for fifty-some years, and I had just taken the clock away.

The phone alarm still went off. But a phone alarm is a jolt, not a wake-up. I would come out of a deep sleep to a buzzing rectangle, slap at it, and then lie there scrolling because the phone was already in my hand. Twenty minutes gone before my feet hit the floor. I spent 24 years in a school health office telling children that screens at bedtime are a bad trade. I did not enjoy discovering I had made the same trade at 54, which is how the JALL Sunrise Alarm Clock ended up on my nightstand.

The idea is simple. Light first, sound second. The JALL handles the light part over twenty minutes and the sound part at the end, so you are not dragged out of sleep by a noise in a black room. You are brought up gradually, and then told, quietly, that it is time.

Here is my actual setting. The clock sits next to the sound machine on my side of the bed. It starts brightening at 6:00 and makes its sound at 6:20. The full screen goes from dark to a low warm glow and keeps climbing for those twenty minutes, so by the time the sound arrives the room is gently lit. Paul is on the right side of the bed and he sleeps hard. Most mornings he does not stir. That is the part I had not counted on mattering so much. An alarm that wakes one person in a shared bed is worth something on its own.

I have set a great many alarms in my life. This is the first one I have not argued with.

Light first, sound second, twenty minutes apart. I am out of bed before the second alarm most mornings now, and I have stopped negotiating with it.

The sound is the part I was least sure about. There are 25 nature sounds and white noises plus an FM radio, and I found one I liked in the first week and have not moved off it since. I have not worked my way through the whole list and I do not intend to. If you want a radio in the morning, it is there. If you do not, you never have to touch it.

Two settings I configured once and have not thought about since. The first is the pair of alarms, which lets you keep a weekday routine separate from a weekend one. I walk on Saturday too, so mine are set the same, but the point is that you do not have to reset anything on Sunday night. The second is the snooze, which you can set anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes. Mine is at 9. I know precisely how long I can lie there and still make the walk, and 9 is the honest number.

There is a sleep timer as well, adjustable from 10 to 480 minutes, and the unit runs off a USB cord. I do not use the timer much, because the sound machine in our room handles the falling-asleep end and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The time is easy to read from across the room, and the clock takes up about seven inches of nightstand and a little over a pound. It has not moved since I set it down.

What it does not do is make me sleep. I still wake around 3 on some nights, and no clock on a nightstand has anything to say about that. It does not replace the curtains either. The room is dark because of the curtains. The clock is what makes the dark room survivable at 6 in the morning. And I will be straight about the controls: my first two evenings I set the light instead of the alarm and had to start over. Read the little card that comes in the box. I did not, at first.

Six months in, the routine is this. Curtains for the morning light, sound machine for the snoring and the neighbor's early truck, and the JALL for the waking part. It is the newest thing in the room and the one I would replace first if it broke, which is not a sentence I expected to write about an alarm clock.

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

I would tell you that most of what makes a morning better is dull. Curtains. A fan. Going to bed at a similar time. The light is the one piece of it that feels like a small kindness rather than a rule, and that is why I kept it. Twenty minutes of a room getting brighter is closer to how mornings used to work in this house before we covered the window. I am not going to tell you it cures anything, because it does not, and I was a nurse too long to start handing out promises. What I can tell you is that I have walked three miles most mornings for six months running, and before the clock I was missing two or three of those a week.

If you sleep alone, or you wake before your partner does, or the room you sleep in is darker at 6 AM than it used to be, this is a reasonable thing to try. If your problem is falling asleep rather than waking up, start somewhere else. Begin with the curtains. They solved a bigger piece of my problem than the clock did. The clock solved the piece the curtains created.