This Alarm Tone Could Make Your Wake-Up Less Groggy, Say Sleep Scientists
Be alert and also alarmed.
If you woke up this morning feeling groggy, have you considered blaming your alarm tone?
Probably not, but some sleep scientists say it’s worth a shot. As The Conversation reports, there is now a body of research to show that some alarm tones can make us more alert upon waking than others. For example, tones with a quality known as “tunefulness” (a nice melody that’s easy to hum along to like The Jackson 5’s ‘ABC’) can work wonders for shaking us out of our slumber.
According to RMIT researchers Stuart McFarlane and Adrien Dyer, the reason some melodies are better at waking us up than others is that the physiological process of waking up isn’t like flicking a switch. (Annoying). Some parts of the brain apparently spring into action earlier than others — studies show that regions that make up our prefrontal cortex (important for alertness) take longer to rev up than other areas needed for arousal. “This means you can be awake, but not quite with it,” the scientists say.
Apparently there are also certain types of sound and music that can re-distribute blood flow to the brain upon waking, which the researchers say tend to be reduced in comparison to what they were before you went to bed.
The article also adds that grogginess levels in the morning depends on whether you awake while from light or deep sleep, and alarm effectiveness depends on age. So, there’s a lot going on here.
What stuck out to us, though, is how certain melodies can work to bolster “alert wakefulness”. In particular, researchers found that how “tuneful” people found their alarm tone can reflect how groggy they feel after waking.
“Here, people who use alarms that carry a tune they will readily hum along to will experience less grogginess than those with a standard ‘beeping’ alarm,” the researchers say. Taking that on board, the scientists put together a custom alarm that when tested led to “significantly better performance upon and after waking” in comparison to standard beeping alarms.
Have a listen to the scientifically-backed alarm tone below.
Yup, this is much nicer than my alarm tone, which is much more ‘fire alarm’ than ‘bird song’.
The researchers report popular music can be good for zapping that unwelcome grogginess (what the scientists term “sleep inertia”) after a short nap, especially if it’s music that you love listening to. Charli XCX it is, then!
Read the full article over at The Conversation.