No Stupid Questions

My garmin watch has a vibrating alarm that works for me. For about a month I woke up thinking some asshole was spamming text messages, but now I know what it is. I have yet to accidentally turn it off.

Get you an app. I've been using this app for 8 years now. Coupled with the laugh from Mr. Popo in DBZ Abridged, I have no issues waking up.

There are also bedshaker alarms, and screaming meanies. The app is the cheapest option to try.

Although the app's designer went and somewhat enshitified things by placing a few features under a subscription, my app for waking up is the best app I've ever come across.

Its called Alarmy and the free version is more than enough to make anyone wake up if they really need to.

1. Set even more alarms. Annoy yourself into being awake. Identify when you want to be awake, and start your first alarms at that time. Increase frequency as you approach the time you need to be awake. Make your wake up time harder to ignore.

2. Involve multiple senses. Sound alone isn't doing it? Add sight, touch, taste, or smell to your alarm regimen. There are several products that can do these kinds of things. For example, I have Home Assistant turn on my room lights to full when my phone alarm goes off, and I could easily add a diffuser, or a vibrator under my mattress. Bonus points if it takes multiple steps to reset your alarm. Which leads me to...

3. Increase alarm reset difficulty. The more you have to conciously engage your brain to reset your room to sleep mode, the harder it will be for your brain to automate the snooze button. Put your phone across the room, use an app that continues to scream until you scan a QR code in another room or solve math problems, make a deal with your partner that they get to spray you with cold water unless you correctly answer these riddles three, anything. Make it difficult for your brain to remain in sleep mode when your alarm goes off.

4. Enlist the humans in your life to help. Ask, cajole, or haggle with your parent, partner, sibling, roommate, friend, or whoever else you've got available to help you wake up. Be it pleasurable reward or punishing annoyance, whatever they can do that is hard to ignore and can get you going will be better than one phone screaming into the void.

5. #4 part 2: Involve medical professionals. Sleep is a process that involves your body, and when your body isn't working as you expect, you take it to the Body Shop. If nothing is working, talk to your doctor about your struggles with waking up when you want. They can help you narrow down the root cause and supply treatment if necessary. This treatment can range from sleep hygene coaching, to OTC medication recommendations, to prescription medication addition or adjustments, or even doing a whole-ass inpatient sleep study to figure out what's going on. If nothing else is working, present your problem to a licensed Professional Human Animal Mechanic.

6. Don't give up. This is a problem that can be addressed. It may take adjustments to your life that are unusual or unpleasant, but remember that, just like exercise, you are trading one unsustainable unpleasantness (i.e.: employment problems due to chronic tardiness), for another sustainable unpleasantness (i.e.: going to bed earlier, or changing your sleep environment)

There are devices that literally shake the bed to wake up a sleeper. Most often used by deaf or hard-of-hearing people for whom audio alarms are non-starters, but it could work for you if you're actually sleeping through and not snoozing. There are a few that work on smells as well.

If you are sleeping so heavily that you sleep through your alarm every time, you probably aren't getting enough sleep. Go to bed earlier.

This might sound blunt, but you need to grow up and accept that you need to wake up on time. Missing three alarms every day is childish.

Go to bed when you need to.

There are alarm clocks that have a lamp built in, and instead of a loud alarm they play things like birdsong and rushing water at increasing volumes while brightening up the lamp to simulate dawn. I much prefer that to a nuclear launch siren, when I have to use an alarm. I don't like to post shopping links because I'm not an ad machine, but if you search around for "gentle wakeup alarm light" you'll definitely find some.

My hack was to get older and have a couple of kids that wear you out, fall asleep on the couch around 9:30 and get up daily around 5:30am without an alarm because your body says you slept enough.

All jokes aside, start sticking to a consistent sleep schedule and your body will wake itself up, no phones or alarms required.

Smart alarms on a smart watch. Set a time window where it'll wake you up at an optimal time in your sleep cycle. Been using the one built into Sleep as Android for years, which another person also mentioned, but a lot of smart watches have smart alarms built in

No tricks. Go to bed early or buy this:

https://a.co/d/g9jAgSw

Go to bed earlier. If you're frequently sleeping through your alarms or falling asleep immediately after turning them off, then you're not getting enough sleep. Any tips and tricks like "two alarms 5 minutes apart" or "drink water before bed so you have to pee when you wake up" will only get you so far where sleep deprivation is concerned.

Well, it mostly depends on why you're missing them.

Believe it or not, sometimes there's nothing you can do. Some people will sleep through any noises at all, though it's really unusual.

Most likely, your brain is telling you that you aren't sleeping enough by refusing to react to the stimulus.

So you gotta fix what's wrong. If you're staying up late, begin rest earlier, even if you don't sleep earlier (which can be the case for some types of insomnia). Just being in dark/low light with as little external stimulus as possible can help your brain and body "recharge" a little even when you don't sleep enough. That's a short term fix, you'll eventually need to figure out what to do to address the insomnia directly.

If you're not staying asleep it's harder to address without outside help. Tbh, it isn't usually something that you can crowd source an answer for just because there's too many possibilities. A sleep study tends to end up being the real answer. But you can try various meditative methods when you wake up to help drop back out faster, if you're waking up enough to do so.

The major problem comes in when you can't tell you're waking up, or are just sleeping so poorly that it amounts to the same thing. Apnea is a bitch like that, so you'd want to rule it out one way or another.

All of that being said, you can also try vibration based alarms, like the kind that go under the mattress or pillow. There's also wrist and headband based ones. Sometimes, especially if your brain is just inviting the alarms because it's pissy about ignoring sounds, tactile stimulation gets the job done because our brains process it differently, and it's harder to filter out past a point.

I would try getting more and better sleep as the primary fix though. Get to bed earlier, make sure you minimize light and noise, and learn some techniques like progressive relaxation and deep, controlled breathing. If you need background sound, err on the side of "white noise" over music, but music will do in a pinch as long as it's on a timer so it doesn't interfere with the sound of the alarm later.

Make sure you aren't snoring heavy, and if you are, address that. The problem is that it often takes a ton of experimentation to figure out what actually helps you. Snoring isn't the same as apnea, necessarily, but it does disturb your sleep sometimes.

Avoid stimulants at least 4 hours before bed. No caffeine, no tobacco, no meth (the last is mostly a joke, but check that any prescription meds or OTC meds aren't stimulants).

And, obviously, if you can, talk to your doctor about a sleep study.

I wish I could sleep in past 6. We are all wired differently. It may never be easy for you to do. Your best bet is to shift your sleeping time forward by an hour or so. Once your mind gets used to it hopefully the alarm will do a better job.

I personally use sleep as android for my wake up alarm when I really need to get up. Has various options that help me. Like forcing me to get out of bed to scan a QR code to dismiss the alarm. Among other great things.

Drink a full glass of water before bed, eventually you'll learn how much to drink to wake you at about the correct time. I used to be absolutely dead to the world while sleeping, I even needed a shock bracelet to wake me. Drinking water was one method I used though.

No sure shot but it does sound like it's not the alarm that's the problem. You've trained yourself to be able to ignore your alarm, that it doesn't mean "get-out-of-bed" time to your unconscious brain. Change the alarm tone on your phone and have a few practice sessions. Set your new alarms after a short nap and as soon as those alarms go off throw off all the covers and stand up fully as soon as you can. The idea is to retrain your brain to get up all the way at the sound of that alarm.

Another thing that's really helped me personally is installing a smart light bulb that turns itself on just before my sound alarms start going off. That way I'm not trying to force myself awake in a dark noisy room.

When do you go to sleep?

I had the same problem, and the solution that worked best for me was to buy a vibrating alarm clock for the hearing impared.

I put it under the mattress topper so there is no way I can ignore or snooze it without getting out of bed.

I forget the name of it, but back before I got old and started waking up consistently before the alarm went off, I had an alarm clock app that made you do math problems in order to shut it off or snooze it. They got progressively harder with each snooze, so you eventually had to actually wake up.

Can't get you out of bed, but it can definitely force your brain to kick into gear which usually kept me from falling back asleep.

I have an alarm clock with two alarms on it. The first is radio, at a reasonable volume. The second is beep Beep BEEP with ascending volume. If the first doesn't wake me the second will. Unless I press the off button and fall back to sleep.

I'm amazed the clock with the bell doesn't wake you (if you mean one of the traditional alarm clocks with the bells on?). Those things are LOUD.

As sound isn't working, maybe try one of those "silent alarms" which just turns a light on to help you wake up naturally (I haven't tried these and would definitely have a beeping alarm as a backup!), or something like a Fitbit which can wake you up by buzzing on your wrist (and will adjust when it wakes you to match your sleep cycle)

I use an old standalone alarm clock, that I put on the other side of the room. So I have to get up to turn it off.

2 alarms, one on the iPad, one on the phone. Full volume, spaced 10 minutes apart.

Edit: these go off almost 2 hours before I have to leave, and I'm asleep 7-8 hours before they go off. My biggest difficulty in waking up on time is not going to bed with enough time to fall asleep for 8 hours.

I have a hard-stop alarm, set 9 hours before I have to wake up, to remind myself to get ready for bed. A full sleep cycle (including morning routine) is an 11-hour time investment for me.

Vibrating smart watch seems to do the trick for me.

Does this occur even after a few nights of proper sleep?

If you generally sleep enough and don't have other sleeping problems you could try to change the ringtone. Or if you are like me and turn off the alarm half a sleep and don't remember it, put your alarms further away from your bed.

Turn the volume up on your alarms, and pick an annoying ring tone helps a lot. As well setting the phone away from the bed if you're able to.