BY: Jinsun Kim

Happy September everyone! It’s already starting to get chilly, and I can’t wait for the autumn season to settle in. The campus will look gorgeous once the trees start changing color. 

I don’t know about you, but with the rainy weather recently, it’s been getting harder for me to wake up in the morning. It’s so hard to not be groggy getting ready for the day when the only source of natural light is a gray hue above the humid air. To combat this, it’s easy to resort to chugging some coffee with our breakfast or taking naps throughout the day. But there are even more subtle ways to change how we jumpstart the morning… take alarms, for example.

Most of us wake up to the “beep beep beep” of some default tone registered on our phones. Studies have shown, however, that waking up to melodic tunes or nature sounds will help a person feel more alert and less groggy than beeping sounds. The variety of tones and rhythms can ease our switch out of sleep inertia, the transitional period between being asleep and awake. This is also the phase when you feel groggy because you are forcing yourself to wake up in the middle of a sleeping stage. So if you have to wake up early, you might as well do it while jamming out. 

Some songs I recommend are ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams or ‘Viva La Vida’ by Coldplay. Try waking up to a warm throwback to middle school- it really hits different. Then on another morning, switch up the tune to something more relaxing, like natural sounds in a forest. The alarm sound doesn’t have to be changed often, but once in a while so that your brain doesn’t learn to tune out on the sound. It will put your mind at ease and brighten your mood first thing in the morning.

I highly recommend you give this a try. If you’re enjoying the sound you wake up to in the morning, hopefully you no longer consider it an “alarm.”