The iPhone alarm is gentle. It fades in. It has a "Snooze" button that is easy to hit. It is designed to be polite.

I bought an old-school Twin Bell Mechanical Alarm Clock. It has no volume control. It has no fade-in. It has no soul. It has one job: To invoke pure terror at 6:00 AM.

> THE SOUND OF DOOM

06:00 AM: The hammer strikes the bells. CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG! It sounds like a fire station inside a tin can. My heart rate went from 50 (sleeping) to 140 (combat ready) in 0.5 seconds.
There is no "waking up groggy." You wake up ready to fight a bear.

[HEART_RATE_MONITOR]
05:59:59 > 52 BPM
06:00:01 > 138 BPM (Adrenaline Spike Detected)
06:00:05 > 110 BPM (Panic Subsiding)

> THE NO PHONE RULE

The best part of using a physical clock is that my phone is not the first thing I touch. Usually, I turn off the phone alarm and immediately check Instagram. With the clock, I turn it off (by physically finding the switch on the back), and... I'm just awake. My phone is in the other room. I stare at the wall. I stretch. I actually get out of bed because the adrenaline won't let me sleep again.

> THE TICKING

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. The mechanical clock makes a sound every second. At night, it is loud. It reminds you that time is passing. You are dying, one second at a time. Some find this annoying. I found it motivating? Or terrifying. "I better sleep now because the ticking won't stop."

> THE SNOOZE BUTTON IS A LIE

The clock technically doesn't have a snooze button. To stop it, I have to pick it up, turn it around, and slide a stiff switch. By the time I do that, my motor functions are fully online. The "Snooze" on a phone is a trap. It keeps you in the "half-sleep" zombie zone. The mechanical clock forces a binary state: Asleep or Awake. No in-between.

> CONCLUSION

I hated the sound. My neighbors probably hated it too. But I woke up at 6:00 AM every single day. No scrolling, no snoozing. I am going back to my phone alarm because I value my heart health. But if I ever need to catch an early flight? The Twin Bell is coming out.