Waking up is hard to do. One minute you’re sleeping peacefully, minding your own business, chasing butterflies in your dream. The next you’re jolted back into reality, staring down the barrel of another day filled with doomscrolling, crippling isolation, and existential dread. But there may be a reprieve in the offing because now you can wake up to your favorite podcast instead of annoying beeps or random music thanks to Next Up. Yes, you’ll still be awake. But at least you can start learning right away, primed to hit the ground running while starting your day in style.
As Lifehacker puts it:
“If you listen to podcasts in the morning, maybe you should jump right into one from the moment you wake up. Next Up synchs with Apple’s Podcasts app to turn your favorite podcast into your alarm clock.
I’m against using your favorite music as an alarm, because you’ll associate the song with stress. But unlike music, you usually listen to a podcast just once. And as your chosen show gets your attention, you can move past ‘ugh what is consciousness’ mode and start absorbing information (if Comedy Bang! Bang! counts as ‘information’).”
The idea of waking up to podcasts and being off to the races mentally is especially important when you consider that our brains are specifically primed for just this sort of mental activity when we first wake up.
According to another article on Lifehacker that examined the best times of day for creative thinking:
“Bouts of creative writing might be easier to come by just after waking as this is the time of day when the prefrontal cortex is most active. A scientific study of brain circuits confirmed that this creative activity is highest during and immediately after sleep, while the analytical parts of the brain (the editing and proofreading parts) become more active as the day goes on. The study looked at morning and evening MRI scans and observed that mornings showed more connections in the brain—a key element to the creative process.”
So, in theory, if we are more creative when we first wake up, more apt to form new connections and come up with new ideas, then we probably should be listening to podcasts, learning new things, gaining new insights and information, that we can then put to immediate use in our forthcoming creative outbursts. And who knows, after a while, we may not even mind waking up anymore.
Is a podcast alarm clock the Greatest Idea Ever?
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