I’ve completely eliminated the alarm clock from my morning routine for about six months. The biggest impacts it's had on my life are:

1. I’ve become a morning person.
2. I wake up feeling great and feel less sleepy during the day.

Becoming a morning person is a necessary side effect of not using an alarm clock because it requires the body to naturally wake up early enough for work, school, or other regular obligations. Although I’ve historically enjoyed staying up late, the brutal truth is that all humans require a certain amount of sleep, and this can't be consistently fought without an alarm clock.

The best part about eliminating alarm clocks from my life is how it has affected my day. It’s not a hidden secret that good sleep habits translate to:

1. Better mood
2. Increased energy levels
3. Clearer mind
4. Improved overall health

I can confidently say I really do feel all these benefits. In the end, it's not to any real surprise. The alarm clock interupts one of the most important cycles of your body, and so it only makes sense to leave sleep alone so it can do what it needs to do.

How I Transitioned to Natural Sleep

Once I decided to try this experiment, I created a simple plan to implement it. Before this life change, my sleep schedule was from around 1 am to 8 am. So, the first thing I did was set an alarm for the target time I wanted to naturally wake up, in my case, 7 am.

The first night resulted in 6 hours of sleep (1 am to 7 am). My body needs more than that, so by the time 11 pm rolled around, I was ready to fall asleep. It was initially tough to sleep earlier than normal, as I felt there was still time to do things, but I let my body dictate my actions and went to bed without an alarm.

That night, I slept for about 9 hours due to sleep debt. I missed my 7 am target, but it wasn’t a big deal. After that, with my body reset, I simply aimed to continue to sleep around 11 pm, meaning I was in bed by 10:30 pm. The pressure of needing to naturally wake up before work was enough motivation to forgo the later hours of the night and continue heading to bed early.

Now, I’ve settled into a great rhythm of going to bed around 10-10:30 pm and waking up around 6:30 am. What’s great is discovering how much sleep my body naturally needs (8-8.5 hours). No more trying to "hack" my body with things like miserable polyphasic sleep experiments. I know what my body needs, I succumb to it, and I’m rewarded the next day.

Some Caveats

What worked for me won’t necessarily work for everyone. Each person and their situation is unique, so results will obviously vary. Some unique factors for me are:

• I’ve always been able to fall asleep quickly, which might be due to consistent sleep deprivation, regular exercise, or both.
• My only dependent is a dog, and she doesn’t mind sleeping in a bit in the morning.
• I always sleep with white noise, which helps block out sounds that would normally wake me up during the night.
• My work schedule is consistently 9 am to 5 pm.

One final note: I still use alarm clocks for special occasions, such as early morning flights. Although I could probably wake up naturally for them, without an alarm set, I would probably wake up in the middle of the night stressed about the possibility of missing my flight.

Try It Out

This change has been significant enough in my life that I frequently recommend it to friends. I now honestly believe that the alarm clock is the single worst thing the wider population willingly inflicts on themselves. If you’re willing to eliminate the morning alarm clock from your life, I would love to hear how it goes. Good luck!

We found out recently that we are expecting an addition to our family and are incredibly excited! It's still early on so we are not trying to get overly excited knowing that things can happen in the first trimester, but would like to begin educating ourselves on the pregnancy process and parenting.

Am curious and would love to hear from everyone what resources they found most helpful on these subjects. Pros for evidence based sources that manage to not be overly dry. Send me what you got! Any general advice you have would also be greatly appreciated :)

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.

If you'd like to help support Ukraine, please visit the official site at https://help.gov.ua/ - an official portal for those who want to provide humanitarian or financial assistance to people of Ukraine, businesses or the government at the times of resistance against the Russian aggression.

Two weeks down! Update your bingo cards and tell us about what you played!

Q: I missed the beginning of this event. Can I still join?
A: Of course! It's open all month.

Topic etiquette:

• It is fine to make multiple top-level posts throughout the week if you play multiple games.

• It is fine to respond to yourself with updates if you're continuing a single game and walk to talk more about it as you go.

• If you are playing Backlog Bingo, feel free to make a top-level post with your card that you edit as you go, while making new posts underneath that to talk about the games as you play them.

Gameplay guidelines:

• Goals for this event (if any) are entirely individual and self-determined.

• You do NOT need to finish games unless you want to. The point is to try out games and have fun, not force ourselves to play things we're not interested in.

Backlog Bingo

Thanks to the amazing efforts of our very own @Wes, we are debuting Backlog Bingo! This is a completely optional way to participate in the month.

You can generate a unique Backlog Bingo card from a collection of 73 different categories. Choose the ones you want in your batch, and then use Wes's custom-made online tool to automatically create your own individualized bingo card.

Wes's tool automatically assembles the markdown for your table, so it will paste beautifully into comments here on Tildes. For example:

Play games throughout the month to check off categories in the Bingo card. The ★ in the middle of every card is a free space -- there are no requirements for that square and any game you play fits there!

The most basic win condition is five-in-a-row, but, if you're feeling really wild, you might go for a win pattern that's a little more involved. Your choice!

Here's an example of someone "winning" the card above:

Bingo Golfing (thanks @Wes and @aphoenix!) is also an option: trying to clear a pattern by counting multiple categories for a single game, thus “winning” with as few games as possible.

Step 3 of Wes's tool includes instructions for checking off games, which has to be done manually. If you need an in-thread guide, you can use the following example below:

||
|:-:|
| ✅ ~~Struckthrough Example Category~~ <br> **Bolded Game Title** |

If you can't figure out how to check off categories or you break the Markdown for your table, feel free to ask for help in the comments or PM me and I can help you out!

FAQs

After reading The Body Snatchers and The Puppet Masters, I am almost finishing Blood Music and I am not yet done with that theme.

These are all stories about human possession or replacement with copies by other entities, extraterrestrial or otherwise. As I finish Blood Music, I find myself craving for more. It doesn't matter if it is about invasion or something else that takes over our bodies and minds. Stories that question and entice our attachment to our identities, as well as our desire to conform and dissolve into the collective.

I wish for stories that are not about just one person undergoing a transformation, but rather a group or a community (family, town, country, the world).

Ideally, they should be some kind of science fiction (even if science's role is not immediately obvious and overt), but I am open to suggestions if you believe something in other genres deserves my attention.

References:

• The Body Snatchers
• The Puppet Masters
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
• Blood Music
• Body Snatchers - TV Tropes

I wish to know more about science in general and books are a good way to do that. We have a good assortment of science-minded people on Tildes, so I think it would be interesting to know what everyone recommends. The one requisite is that the books must be adequate for a general audience. This means that the books must not require the reader to hold a STEM degree or even have a particular aptitude for STEM.

Just so it is abundantly clear: I am looking for books that people with an arts and humanities background can read. Laypeople. "Dummies".

I'm asking more about books that are intros to a specific field than introductions to science in general.

Thanks!

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!