I want to be honest about how bad it actually was because I think people underestimate how much damage a snooze button can do.

Five alarms. Every single morning. Starting from 6:30am. I’d snooze all five, drag myself out of bed at 8, rush out the door in a panic, skip breakfast, show up to everything late or barely on time, and spend the first two hours of every day just trying to feel like a functioning human being.

That was my life for five years. And I just accepted it as normal.

I told myself I was a night person. That some people just aren’t built for mornings. That I needed more sleep than most people. I had a whole story around it that made it feel like a personality trait instead of what it actually was.

A habit I’d built and reinforced every single morning for five years.

What it was actually doing to me

It wasn’t just the mornings. That’s what I didn’t understand for a long time.

Starting every day rushed, stressed, already behind, already having broken a promise to yourself before you’ve even eaten breakfast. That feeling doesn’t stay in the morning. It follows you everywhere.

I was irritable by 10am. Unproductive by lunch. Exhausted by 3pm. And then I’d stay up too late because I felt like I’d wasted the day and wanted to salvage something from it. Which made the next morning worse.

Every single day was just damage control from the moment I woke up.

What I tried

Putting my phone across the room. I’d walk over, turn it off, get back into bed.

Setting five alarms. Snoozed all five without thinking.

Going to bed earlier. Still snoozed.

Motivational videos before bed. Felt unstoppable at midnight, completely dead at 6:30am.

Hiding my phone in another room entirely. Found creative ways around it within three days.

The problem was always the same. It came down to one moment every morning where half asleep me had to make a decision and half asleep me made the wrong one every single time without fail.

I needed to stop giving half asleep me a choice.

What finally worked

I found an app called Waken and downloaded it not expecting anything because at that point I’d tried everything.

The idea is simple. When your alarm goes off you have to complete a physical task before it stops. Some mornings it’s push ups. Some mornings it’s an object hunt where you have to find something specific around your place, photograph it and the app checks the photo before the alarm will turn off. Other mornings it’s going outside and taking a photo of the sky, or making your bed, or sit ups.

No snooze button. No dismissing it. The alarm does not stop until you prove you’ve completed the task.

First morning it made me do push ups at 6:30am before my eyes were even open. I was furious. But I was awake. Properly, actually awake. Standing in my bedroom having just done push ups and thinking oh, that’s how you do it.

What changed

• Stopped needing five alarms within the first week
• Actually had time in the morning for the first time in years
• Ate breakfast for the first time in I don’t know how long
• Got to work early and focused instead of late and frantic
• The rest of my day completely changed because I stopped starting it in a hole

The streak system kept me going too. Once you’ve built a few weeks you become weirdly protective of it. The idea of breaking it over one bad morning starts to feel worse than the snooze ever felt good.

The honest truth about snoozing

You are not a night person. You are not someone who needs more sleep than everyone else. You are not just bad at mornings.

You just have an alarm that asks nothing of you. And at 6:30am when you are half asleep and completely irrational you will always take the path of least resistance.

Take that path away. Make waking up require something from you. The first few days will be annoying. By the end of the first week you won’t recognise your mornings.

Five years of snoozing and I fixed it in a week. The only thing that was missing was something that made it impossible to go back to sleep.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​