Two Drugs, One Alarm, and How to Wake Up With Fewer Choices
How to wake up when you lie there bargaining: a 1995 JAMA study found an extra option made doctors pick neither. Cut your morning to one choice someone sees.
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The note on my nightstand said, in my own handwriting, “Feet first. Then decide.” I wrote it after a winter of lying there each morning holding a small parliament: snooze once, dismiss and doze, check messages “to wake up properly,” or get up. Four motions on the floor, and the one that always passed was the one that required nothing of me.
If you want to know how to wake up and actually leave the bed, my answer is to shrink the morning to a single choice and give that choice a witness. Two good options feel like freedom at night. At 6 a.m. they feel like a reason to wait.
What did the doctors in the 1995 study do?
Donald Redelmeier and Eldar Shafir mailed clinical scenarios to physicians and published the results in JAMA (1995, vol. 273, pp. 302-305). In one, a patient had osteoarthritis. Family physicians offered a single medication to consider prescribed it 72% of the time. Those offered two medications prescribed either one only 53% of the time. The extra option made the hard choice harder, and “neither” won. They found a similar tilt among neurologists and neurosurgeons deciding about carotid surgery, and among legislators deciding about hospital closures.
I read that and thought of my parliament. When nothing is chosen, the status quo wins, and in the morning the status quo is a warm bed. I had already met the way an old arrangement gets a head start before, without noticing I slept in one.
Is this a law of human nature?
I would not call it one. Later replications of choice-deferral studies have been mixed, and a large 2023 effort in Management Science cast real doubt on the originals. What I trust is narrower: a brain still clearing two to four hours of sleep inertia is slow at nearly everything, comparison included, so I stopped asking it to compare.
How to wake up with only one choice left
The note and the parliament above compress many mornings into one; the routine that came out of them is short. One alarm. No snooze. The phone across the room. The only question left is whether my feet hit the floor, and someone besides me finds out if they don’t. Goncharov’s Oblomov had a servant for that and still lost.
The witness is the part I couldn’t build alone. DontSnooze turns that one question into something my friends will see answered, which is the only way I’ve found to take “neither” off the menu.
Tonight, open your clock app and count the alarms. Delete all but one, and write the note.