THERE IS NO CAUSE FOR ALARM

THERE IS NO CAUSE FOR ALARM

An alarm is meant to be annoyingly noisy and incessantly frustrating. These are good qualities of the device designed to start your day, to shake you up from that sweet sleep. These are the reasons I like a good alarm. Well, except that I never really respond to them. I have a way of silencing them and continuing with the sleep till my body is thoroughly satisfied with sleep, turning like a door hinge on my bed. Until I found out that sleeping six straight hours everyday is spending one-fourth of my life in bed. And the eight hours most “sleep experts” recommend means a whopping one- third of my life spent just napping. I plan to live for 90years (And God is willing to grant that), if I strictly follow what the expert says, then, at the end of my years, I would have spent 30years in bed. This is why I employed the service of an alarm, a good one.

The problem with alarm is control. As long as the victim of heavy sleep can just briefly wake up to conveniently control the alarm by either snoozing or shutting it down completely, then, the purpose is defeated. This is a challenge I quickly identified, and it propelled me to take an action. I immediately downloaded an alarm software and installed on my phone; a nameless software that had no control, and couldn’t be stopped.

I can recall the first time this alarm woke me up. The shrilling sound was high enough to wake my whole neighbourhood. And it couldn’t be stopped, even after I had to switch off the phone. It was insistent and it became a nuisance. But that is what alarms are meant for, an intruder we introduce into our lives to help us get it straight; else sleep has “dominion over us”. The alarm could only be silenced after I removed the battery of my cell phone, but by then, drowsiness like a bird would have flown away. My eyes would be cleared. For this, the alarm was effective, yet, its major flaw was that it wasn’t just waking me up; it was waking many within an alarming radius up. It had no control as regard volume, and I never bothered to snooze it either. There was no cause for controlling it, everything was under alarm. It wasn’t long and I began to hate the alarm which I so loved.  I had to uninstall it. Then, I began to train my body in the art of “controlled sleep”.

First, I had to realize the purpose of sleep. It’s just so the body will be more effective in its functions. And if I want to imbibe the habits successful people have inculcated over the years and have proven to work for them, one of the first things I should control is time, a large amount of which could be spent in the act of sleep if not cautioned; unnecessary napping, only because that is what the body wants. But once the body is programmed, and new sleeping habits are developed, one begins to sleep effectively. You find your body naturally falling asleep at a particular hour of the night and automatically waking up, refreshed, without the service of an alarm in the morning. Then, you have no cause to use an alarm again.

It’s not in the number of hours one sleeps eventually as long as your sleep produces results at the end of the day by making your body effective for work and not hindering you from achieving your goals either because you haven’t taken enough sleep or you have overslept. Unfortunately, oversleeping has grievous side effects just like not taking enough sleep has loads of negative impacts on you. If you sleep too much, it could give you headache because of the effect it has on the neurotransmitters of the brain. Oversleep is also one of the causes of obesity and its linked to heart diseases.

I have since discarded all alarms. Even after I discovered some very talented ones that could do a host of alarmingly nasty things to you like leaping as it goes off so you don’t end up snoozing it. In the bid to lay hold of it, you would have gotten off from bed eventually. Incredibly smart alarm that requires you to stand up rock it like a baby before it shuts down and won’t get fooled if you attempt to rock it while lying on the bed. One requires solving mathematical equation to make it shut up, another has puzzle pieces that leaps off to the floor and you will have to get up to pick them and fix back before its gets to be snoozed. And an alarm that sings in Japanese and yells at you when you attempt to silence it. But the one that probably wins my admiration the most is the one programmed to automatically dial your boss’ number when you attempt to snooze it.

Teju duru is a freelance journalist, an artist, and a beauty consultant based in Ibadan. She devoted her heart to Jesus sometimes ago.

© July 2015