I was recently talking to a friend who mentioned that he has an extreme problem with setting alarms on his phone to wake up every morning.
- He has to set several alarms every day, but he will still sleep through all of them.
If he does manage to find an alarm that adequately riles him from his deep sleep, he develops such an adverse reaction to the alarm that he can’t sleep at night. He just lies awake and dreads the disturbing sound cutting through his silent bedroom. Honestly, this is the first time that I had thought about an alarm in a long time. I don’t use a conventional alarm, because my body will naturally wake up as soon as I smell a fresh cup of coffee. Thankfully, my HVAC system is set up in a way that this is never a problem. Whoever originally installed our Heating and Cooling plan, along with the ductwork that connects our furnace and air conditioning unit to every room, positions of the air return vent in a strange place. The air return is right in the kitchen, over one of the countertops. The air vent functions to draw up our indoor air and return it to the furnace or air conditioning system, depending on the heating or cooling setting being engaged. Then, the air is cleaned and retreated before circulating back through the air ducts. I’m not sure why they chose this position for the air return vent in our house, but it has a beneficial side effect for a troubled sleeper like me. Every morning when my husband gets up and makes coffee, the smell of his fresh joe wafts right through the air return vent, passes through the HVAC system, and is redistributed through the ductwork. I wake up every day like the star of a Folgers commercial.
