Do these bother you when it’s quiet in a room? I’m still trying to find a way to sleep again, and we have a clicky clock. I am not sure if I find the regular click disturbing or somehow steadying.
I’ve got clocks like that all over the place.
Never bothered me before, but now that you mention it…
No analog clocks of any sort in my house. Frankly not sure if my parents have any. Maybe one? But my paternal grandmother? Her place was lousy with clocks. Ticking everywhere you looked. It was madness.
Drives me crazy when I’m trying to sleep. When I finished a busy shift as a waiter running around all night and getting back home still buzzing from the busyness, the steady tick of my parents’ clock helped wind me down and get me back in sync, but for sleeping I need peace and quiet or something natural and somewhat uneven, like rain or the wind or, I dunno, waves.
I’m not sure I’m following. Try removing the clock for a few nights and see what that does for you?
I over-think it:
"I took the clock out the last 3 nights lets see if this works. Or wait, am I just tricking myself via placebo effect? "
I have one in my computer room too and I think it’s bothering me when I don’t have noise. Or maybe the silence would be worse, but have trouble figuring it out because I think so much.
While generally i don’t notice, when i do, i find it very hard to unnotice.
It’s been my experience that physically removing the second hand does not harm the clock. Sadly, it also does little to diminish the sound. I’m sort of embarrassed to mention that particular clock accidentally fell into a sink full of water…before ultimately breaking on the hard kitchen tile when it fell off the wall. Probably because of an earthquake.
We only have digital clocks now. It’s been my experience that they don’t fall off the walls as much.
I can’t stand ticking clocks. I’d rather have constant noise when I’m trying to sleep, like a fan.
We have some old analog clocks in meetings rooms at my office, and they have very loud tick-y second hands. Most of them end up just getting their batteries mysteriously removed.
If you take the clock out and find you are sleeping better, does it matter if it’s a placebo effect or not? Hint: no, it does not matter.
Consider removing the clock to see if the ticking’s absence feels better or feels like nothing. Or you miss it. Just remove it from the equation for a few days to determine how you feel about it. It could be you just need some white noise. There are several free white-noise apps you could put on your phone, from soft ocean sounds to jungle noises. You could replace the ticking clock with that. Also, what works for me when I’m sleeping is having the ceiling fan on.
We have a clock that chimes the hour in the living room. We can hear it from the bedroom. Now this clock stops chiming between 10PM and 6AM. Smart clock, eh? No. While it does not chime then, it still makes a loud CLICK every hour. The click is more disturbing than the chimes.
I had an analog watch a long time ago, when I wore a watch, it would go on in the morning and never be removed until I went to bed… removed in another room sometimes under a pillow. I can’t stand that sound, especially when trying to sleep.
I wish there’d been a conclusive difference. In reality there probably wasn’t, but if I swing 30 minutes more one way, after only averaging 1-3 hours of sleep a night, that little bit of extra can be nice. Trying not to think too much about how long it took to go to sleep or how fast I awoke as it leads to more anxiety about lack of sleep.
When I was a baby, my parents told me I’d be fascinated by the slight clicking sound of my father’s watch. I’d lean my ear up against it and eventually fall to sleep. When I was a bit older, I remember visiting my great grandfather (so old he served in Puerto Rico back in the 1800’s), and he’d have all kinds of amazing clocks in every room. I’d love listening to them and then watching them do their thing whenever the time came. Similarly, I came to love the sound of being on a train. I’d doze off to the clickity clack of the tracks.
Sometime between then and having a kid of my own, I came to really appreciate silence. But even now, there’s still some vague attraction I have to the ticks of a clock. It’s almost like the heartbeat of machinery, perhaps adding an illusory warmth in place of cold metal.
@jpinard I know what you’re talking about - you can be lying in bed and all of a sudden you hear the click click click of the second hand and it seems that’s all you hear. And at that point you just can’t ignore it!
One way to solve that issue would be to get a white noise generator. We use one when we go to bed and the constant noise level seems to help. If we forget to bring it when we travel we really miss it!
Chicks always need to use a second hand on mine, but I don’t think it’s that much louder.
[edit]Oh, CLOCKS! Sorry, I misread
I ALWAYS remove the loud clicky clock from the wall when I’m staying at my mom’s house. That thing is AWFUL for sleeping.
Edit: I remove it from the wall and lay it flat on a soft surface. That silences it.
This. I can’t stand analog clock sounds, but I need me some white noise. A fan running, even if it’s blowing in the opposite direction of the bed. Recently we put a HEPA air purifier in the bedroom that doubles as a good white noise generator.
I’ve been known to play 10-hour YouTube fan sounds when I’m traveling and have nothing else in the hotel room.
Sounds pretty smart to me.