The Evolving Worker

Do you have a hard time waking up? After reading a couple of painful comments on a post entitled “how do you make sure you wake up?”, I realized that dawn simulators are not as widespread as I thought they were.

Here is a presentation, in hope my readers will benefit from a useful discovery.

Introducing the dawn simulator

The dawn simulator is a pleasant replacement to the usual alarm clock, providing a simulation of fade-in and fade-out of light.

The Lumi 200 (for French market – I believe an American equivalent is the BioBrite Digital Sunrise) I was offered two years ago looks like a rather elegant globe of light.

I find this device makes it a lot easier to wake up. The overall feeling we get is that we’re awake “naturally” and before the included alarm finally rings.

Here are the features I actually use:

• programmable (15/30/45 minutes) light fade-out when you want to sleep
• programmable wake-up time and fade-in duration (15/30/45 minutes of progressive light increase before waking-up), with an alarm when reaching full brightness
• special light-bulb simulating a warm daylight (I didn’t have to change it so far)

A while back I may have considered this kind of product to be amusing. After two years of use I would not travel without it and I don’t miss the classical alarm clock trauma. On a more long term view, if you’re affected by the lack of light during winter, this product definitely helps.

About kids: we have a baby. Having a bit of progressive fade-in light makes things easier when he wakes up earlier than we’d like him to. We also use the fade-out feature for his room.

About Light Therapy

Dawn simulators are only an example of products issued from the light therapy research. Light Therapy basically consists of exposure to specific rays aiming at reducing seasonal affective disorder and non-seasonal depression (very short version!). This research has also developed lighting products for the desktop and other devices.

Does it work? From what I can tell – yes, absolutely. This has a great impact on how you feel during the day. This tool and a couple of light-bulbs spread throughout our flat have definitely changed the way we wake up and live. The light reduction during winter is not a big deal anymore now.

Where to buy these products?

You can either pick a specialized local store like I did or find an online shop: the Lumi 200 is available on amazon.fr.

For my american readers, I believe the Lumi brand is not available over there, but the BioBrite Digital Sunrise dawn simulator seems very close in terms of features (I assume it may be the same thing rebranded).

There are a lot of other products in this market including the ones from Verilux.

If you are in Europe, be sure to check out La Journée Parfaite, a great online shop with plenty of references of dawn simulators, both in French and English (mention “the evolving worker” in your order comments to support my writings).

[BioBrite digital sunrise dawn simulator]