The sound of your morning alarm ringtone really does set the tone of your day when it comes to how awake it makes you feel. However, it might surprise you when you find out which type of alarms worked best.
Your morning alarm ringtone may have a big impact on how alert, alive, and awake you feel in the morning when you wake up. Nowadays, there are a lot of options to choose from when it comes to the sound of the ringtone that wakes us up every morning. But do our ringtone choices affect how awake we feel when we wake up after the alarm rings?
If you don’t wake properly, your work performance can be degraded for up to 4 hours, and that could lead to a lot of accidents or errors.
You would be confident to say that a startling, loud, and annoying morning alarm ringtone would improve alertness, but apparently, it’s not that! It appears that melodic alarms might be the key element in waking up more alive, alert, and awake! Who would’ve known!
Sleep Inertia
Before we delve deeper into the effects of morning alarm ringtones, let’s first talk about sleep inertia. The groggy feeling when you wake up, you probably know that feeling all too well. The grogginess that seems to weigh you down when you wake from sleep or that heavy feeling right after you wake up is called sleep inertia.
Sleep inertia is defined as a physiological state of impaired cognitive and sensory-motor performance that is present immediately after awakening. It is the transitional state between being asleep and being awake, marked by impaired performance, reduced vigilance, and a desire to return to sleep.
The longer and more intense the state of sleep inertia is upon first waking up, the more intense the feeling of grogginess, confusion, and clumsiness in the morning.
So what causes sleep inertia?
Sleep inertia is often caused by three factors. Higher levels of delta waves, slower brain reactivation, and slow blood flow in the brain.
If you don’t experience sleep inertia very often, or your grogginess upon waking tends to wear off pretty quickly, you probably don’t need to worry about it. If you have trouble shaking off the grogginess and its interference with your ability to get on with your daily living activities, then reading further might solve your problems.
Melodic Alarms
A melody is perceived as an articulate entity or musical phrase. Melodic alarms have the presence of at least two notes, time, and the sequence in which the notes are sounded with each other, in contrast to an alarm that repeats a single note, like a traditional alarm clock, a Melodic alarm helps to focus our brain’s attention.
It’s been found that while there were no significant associations between actual sleep inertia and the sound of one’s morning alarm, there was a significant association between the type of alarm tone and a person’s perceived sleep inertia.
Therefore, people who used more melodic alarms reported feeling more alert in the mornings, whereas those whose alarms had harsher sounds, like that of intermittent beeping or loud and annoying sirens, said they felt groggier and less awake.
While this may not seem that important, it’s good to remember that people in jobs that require immediate responsiveness like emergency nurses, firefighters, construction workers, pilots, and policemen may benefit from the current findings.
It’s especially important for people who might possibly work in dangerous areas or situations after waking up but also for anyone who has to be rapidly alert.
While it is unclear (and yet to be tested) why the sound of our alarms might influence how we feel when we wake up, we think that a harsh sound might work to disrupt or confuse our brain activity when waking, which is good for emergencies and immediate evacuations, but it might be better to effectively transition to a waking state by using a melodic sound for a morning alarm ringtone.
If your phone or alarm doesn’t have an option for melodic songs, it might be time to download melodic ringtones for your phone. There are a lot of sites online where you can download melodic ringtones for either Android and iOS phones. You have sites like Zedge, All-ringtones.com, iTuneMachine, or RingToneMaker.
Conclusion
In the future, the continued observance of how our chosen morning sounds could influence our state of alertness may have significant implications for people’s well-being and overall productiveness.