How the JALL Sunrise Alarm Clock Became Part of My Evening Routine

I bought the JALL Sunrise Alarm Clock in the first week of March, along with four other things for the bedroom, after a winter of waking at three in the morning and lying there for an hour or more. It arrived the same week as everything else. I am sixty-one, retired after thirty years as a school librarian, and I had already tried the obvious things: a darker room, a cooler room, a quieter room. What I had not changed was the way I woke up. For twenty years a phone alarm had done that job.

The JALL is a small clock that sits on a tabletop, runs off a USB cord, and its main trick is that the light comes up gradually before the sound ever starts. I set mine for 6:45 on weekdays. I did not expect it to change anything. I expected a lamp with a timer attached, and I was half right.

The phone was the actual problem, and I did not see it for years. It sat on my nightstand by the window that faces the street lamp, and when it buzzed my hand found it before my eyes were open. Then I was reading a news alert with my heart going, and the day had started badly before I had stood up. Now the phone charges in the kitchen overnight. That one change did more than any alarm setting I have ever tried.

What the JALL gives you is a full-screen light that brightens from dark to full before the alarm sounds, in your pick of light modes, seventeen of them according to the listing. It runs two alarms, so mine are set separately for weekdays and weekends, which matters when Saturday should not start at a quarter to seven. There are twenty-five nature sounds and an FM radio built in, plus a sleep timer you can set anywhere from ten minutes to eight hours. Mine ends with a soft birdsong.

It lives on my nightstand next to the white noise machine, and the two do different jobs. The white noise runs all night. The JALL is only for morning. I do not use its built-in sounds overnight at all, because that was already covered and I did not want to learn a second machine at eleven o'clock at night.

I still wake some nights. What changed is the first ten minutes of the day, not the whole night.

One honest note. I wear a contoured sleep mask most nights, because the street lamp was my biggest problem in all of this, and a mask covers your eyes. On many mornings the mask blocks the glow completely and the birdsong is what wakes me. On mornings I have already pushed the mask up onto my forehead, the light does the work and the waking is gentler. I am not going to pretend otherwise to make the clock sound better than it is.

Dale sleeps on the left side and snores lightly. He does not use the clock and has never asked to. The birdsong is quiet enough that it does not wake him, which surprised me, and the light on my side of the room does not bother him either. He still wakes to his own alarm, and that is fine.

Eight months in, here is the plain version. I still wake some nights. Usually once, and I am back asleep in about twenty minutes instead of an hour. Some nights are worse than that, and I will not blame the clock or credit it. The JALL did not cure anything. It changed the shape of my mornings, and it gave me one fewer reason to keep a phone beside the bed.

I do not use the FM radio. I found a station once, decided I preferred the quiet, and never went back to it. I do not use the sleep timer either, because the white noise machine covers the falling-asleep half and the JALL covers the waking half. If you want one device to do both, it can. I just already had the other half handled.

The part I did not anticipate is that the clock made me tidier about bedtime. Setting two alarms, one for weekdays and one for the weekend, means I look at the thing every evening. Looking at it makes me think about the hour. I will not claim a clock fixed my routine. But it is the last thing I touch at night now, and that has been worth something.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were across from me with a cup of tea, I would say this first: change one thing at a time and give it two weeks. I bought five things in March and I could not honestly tell you which one did the most, so I will not pretend the JALL was the hero of the story. What I will say is that being woken by light is gentler than being woken by a buzzer, and at sixty-one, with the mornings stiffer than they used to be, that counts. I would tell you the mask will block the glow on plenty of mornings, so buy it knowing that. I would tell you to move the phone out of the bedroom, which costs nothing and helped me more than anything I bought. And I would tell you that if you are waking at three most nights for months, or if your husband snores and seems to stop breathing, that is a conversation for a doctor, not a shopping list. The JALL is a good clock. It is not medicine.