I have always been a night owl and understand the real value of sleep in the mornings. Although, I’d live to utilise a couple hours in the morning for productivity, be it exercise or work. The couple extra hours everyday can compound but i find it hard to get out of bed and take on the day first thing in the morning. I can’t have unproductive hours leading up to sleep and waking up from sleep. Any tips?
Does anyone else become an insanely motivated person at like 11pm? I’ll be lying there thinking tomorrow is different. alarm at 7:30. get up immediately. shower. coffee. maybe even go for a walk before I start working.
Then 7:30 actually arrives and apparently the person who made all those plans no longer exists. alarm off. “5 more minutes”
wake up again at 9:12 feeling like I’ve already failed the day lol
For a long time I kept trying to fix the actual waking up part.
Different alarms, putting my phone further away, leaving the blinds open, setting multiple alarms etc.
Some of it helped a little, but I recently realized I was kinda attacking the last 5 minutes of a problem that started like 8 hours earlier.
My evenings were completely random.
I’d get into bed at 11, scroll until 11:45, decide I wasnt tired, watch something, suddenly it’s 1am, then start stressing because now I KNOW tomorrow morning is going to suck.
So lately I’ve been experimenting more with making the last 30ish minutes before sleep almost painfully predictableinstead.
lights down.
phone away.
same sound.
nothing new or interesting.
I started making the same nighttime sound in Nocturne: Binaural Waves, usually brown noise + a little rain + a really soft binaural layer. The reason I’ve stuck with that one is you can actually build the mix yourself instead of endlessly looking for another track, so once I got it how I liked it I basically stopped touching it. Now I put that exact setup on every night. (average reddit user probably hates me for mentioning a "product" now)
And I think the biggest difference isn’t even the specific sounds.
It’s that there’s no decision anymore.
When that sound starts, I’m done for the day.
No “one more video”, no searching for another sleep playlist, no checking what time I should wake up if I fall asleep in exactly 17 minutes.. just boring.
Which I think might actually be what I needed.
I’m still absolutely capable of negotiating with my alarm in the morning lol, but getting to sleep at roughly the same time has made getting out of bed feel WAY less like trying to resurrect myself.
It also made me realize how backwards my approach was.
I kept looking for something powerful enough to wake me up, when maybe I needed to get better at actually ending the previous day.
Curious if anyone else here found that fixing their mornings actually started at night? Also what is your “okay the day is over now” trigger?
I feel like I never really had one before.
I live in Seattle for most of the year (the months where the weather is the most miserable, unfortunately) Even when I'm in a very nice and sunny place, I'd still sometimes close the alarm (watch, phone, physical etc.) in my sleep... bruh sometimes I could walk all the way to the other side of the room, do a task, all being half awake...
Also, any other suggestions? (btw I live in a dorm)
Yesterday, my new coworkers ask me what time I got to bed. how tall will I try to go at least nine or 9:30 but I ended up going to bed at 10pm. I was saying I don’t like going to bed early. One of my coworkers said how come? I said because I’m not really a morning person. Open saying I don’t like getting up in the morning they got all confused like I was tired and had a long overwhelming day so I wasn’t thinking straight. There’s something about getting up earlier like 7 AM I was like I don’t like going to get really bad at the same time. I don’t like getting up in the morning. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you guys. we all ended up laughing because I don’t know and I was like I look I’m tired okay?” They we’re confused on what I said.
Another coworker said, “Then you have a problem.” And they laugh. I sarcasticlly said, “Yeah I do apparently.” That’s what I get for opening my mouth.
For years, I was obsessed with the idea of being a "morning person." I’d read all the books, set my alarm for 5:30 AM, and tell myself tomorrow is the day.
But without fail, the alarm would go off, my brain would negotiate a "5 more minutes" deal, and I’d wake up 90 minutes later feeling rushed, reactive, and completely behind on the day.
I realized that relying on willpower at 5:30 AM is a losing battle. Your sleep-deprived brain will always choose the mattress over discipline. If you want to own your morning, you can't rely on motivation; you have to build a system that forces you to execute.
Here is the 4-step protocol that finally allowed me to build a bulletproof morning routine:
1. The "10-Hour Caffeine Rule" This is basic but non-negotiable. It takes about 10 hours for caffeine to fully clear your receptors. If you sleep at midnight, no coffee after 2 PM. Your brain might feel tired at night, but if caffeine is in your system, your sleep architecture (deep sleep) gets destroyed, making waking up physically harder.
2. Hydration over Snoozing You lose a massive amount of water while sleeping. That groggy feeling is often just severe dehydration. I started keeping a full 32oz bottle of water next to my bed. Before my feet hit the floor, I force myself to chug half of it. It kickstarts your metabolism almost instantly.
3. Breaking the "Bed-Proximity" Loop (The Game Changer) This was my biggest issue. If I can reach my phone from my bed, I will snooze it. I tried putting it across the room, but I would literally sleepwalk, turn it off, and get back in bed.
I realized I needed something that forced my brain to engage in logical thought, completely away from my mattress.
Since I’m a software dev, I ended up building a custom iOS alarm app for myself called So Alarmed: Anti Snooze Alarm. It completely overrides the volume limits, and the only way to shut the alarm up is to get out of bed by awaking the brain and so am I.
4. 10 Minutes of Sunlight Huberman talks about this constantly, but it’s real. Once I wake up, I don't look at social media. I go straight outside or look out a bright window for 10 minutes. It resets your circadian rhythm so waking up at that same time tomorrow is 1% easier.
Summary If you want to be highly productive, stop relying on willpower to get you out of bed. Build an environment that leaves you no choice but to succeed. Win the morning, win the day.
(Note: If anyone else struggles with the "sleepwalking to turn off the alarm" issue, I eventually put the mission-based app I built on the App Store. You can try it here: [ App Store Link]. Let me know if it helps you take your mornings back!)
PRODUCTIVE DAYS -> HAPPY SLEEP -> MENTAL PEACE
DON"T FORGET TO SPREAD LOVE & HAPPINESS
I feel like when I was a kid I was never this bad but it seems like the older I get the harder it is to wake me up, i can’t wake up on my own no matter how many alarms I set, I just sleep through them, I’m also married and my husband struggles so hard to wake me up, on the weekends he wakes up and goes to work at 5 am, he had to call me 50+ times plus set off “find my iPhone” off like 20 times to wake me up.
Ik it upset him but it’s not like I do it intentionally, I hate that I’m difficult to wake up and idek why, it’s not like I’m getting sleep, I could be asleep for 12 hours and still be impossible to wake up. Im not depressed? Yes my mental health isn’t the best but I don’t know what could be causing it, does anyone have any tips?
I’ve always found it interesting how differently people feel about the same time of day.
I’m definitely more of a night person. Everything feels quieter, I can relax, watch something, listen to music, or just scroll without feeling rushed. 😂
What about you — morning person or night owl?
Background: I work in healthcare (also have a B.S. Computer Science) and my weekly schedule is never the same. Sometimes I work different shifts. I used to set my alarms to repeat every day, even when I wasn't working, so that I wouldn't worry about forgetting to set them. The problem was, my alarms rang on my days off in the middle of the week. Traditional alarms only repeat weekly. Then when I worked a different shift, I would have to remember to turn on alarms for that other shift. There were several times after my days off that I forgot to turn on my alarms, causing me to be late for work multiple times.
So, I decided to create an app to solve this problem and keep it easy to use. Since I know my schedule 1–2 months in advance, I was previously manually turning alarms on and off for my workdays and days off. With this app, I simply use the built-in tools to quickly import my schedule from an Excel sheet, and it schedules my alarms into a calendar (marked with colored shapes). If I work a different shift and want the same alarm routine before my start time, there's a feature called Timelines that copies the alarm 'template' to a different event time. That way, my 2nd shift alarms look just like my 1st shift alarms, only at different times.
I haven't been late for work since, and I don't have to worry about remembering to set my alarms anymore. It also includes a feature that reminds you to add your next calendar if you forget to upload your new schedule towards the end of the current one.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigmountainoutpost.datedots
I should say this though, if being late would genuinely cost you, keep a backup alarm on something else too. I still do.
If you have any questions or ideas, I would like to hear them.
What kind of adjustments you do in your bedroom to make it more relaxing and make it suitable for sleep.
One of mine is switching to blackout curtain from sheer one..helped me a lot in retaining my early morning sleep.
Basically, i have to get up at 4-4:30 everyday for work and i have a partner who has to get up later. I dont feel tired until 10 pm and my alarms on my phone are no longer waking me up. is there any alarm clocks for heavy sleepers that wont disturb my partner?
I have the exact same problem (as I presume) a lot of you have on here. And I am desperately looking for ways to solve this problem.
What worked best for me up until now is forcing myself to take a walk in the morning (I built an app for this) ... but I still have issues actually wanting to pull through with it a lot of times.
I keep trying to come up with something that forces you to get up, but NOT in a stressful way. If any of you have ideas PLEASE let me know. I am willing to build and to share what I built. I just want to have a normal schedule so my gf and I dont live past each other 🫠
I’ve always been a good sleeper, I don’t struggle falling asleep and I sleep through the whole night. I go to bed at decent hours and wake up at decent hours, even though, especially in summer, I have a messy routine.
My main issue is that I struggle waking up. I do wake up, eventually. I have missed appointments and work because I couldn’t wake up very rarely in my life. But waking up is SO HEAVY for me. So. Fucking. Heavy. I never wake up on the first alarm, and I fall back asleep many times before actually getting out of bed.
So I’ve tried different things, and one advice I always read is: put the alarm clock in a different room. So I’ve been doing that, but it doesn’t work. When the alarm goes off in the other room, I get out of bed, go to the other room, turn off the alarm and just go back to sleep until the next alarm goes off. the fact that I live alone doesn’t help because I can literally fall as wherever I like lol.
What can I do?
what I have seen suggested is: put just one alarm, not many, because your brain will fall back asleep if it knows there’s another alarm waking you up in 10 minutes. But don’t give me this tip. I know it would probably work. But I am an anxious person and could not go to bed with just one alarm set for the next day, I would be afraid of missing work or important stuff.
I have to wake up at 4:30 for work, this has been the case for every job I've had for the last 5 years, but the last 12 months have been impossible for me. I've genuinely tried everything I can think of and I'm on the verge of being fired (currently typing this at 07:06AM knowing I'm going to end up being nearly 3 hours late to work). I use my phone alarms which are set every 15 mins from 4:15-5:00 and are all randomly chosen songs from my Spotify playlists in the hopes of stopping my brain from drowning out the noise. My partner's phone is set to the same times but that annoying iPhone alarm that sounds like a xylophone right next to your face. And I have a physical alarm clock set to 4:30. I sleep with all of these less than 12 inches from my face, and every morning I wake up hours afterwards to notifications that my alarms stopped automatically after the 10 minutes ring duration because I didn't even wake up to silence them. My job doesn't believe that I'm desperately trying not to be late, and I have no idea what else to do. PLEASE help me Reddit 😭
Actually, by nature and personality, I really like going to bed early and waking up early; I've been like that since childhood.But lately I've noticed I'm having serious sleep problems. I especially have trouble falling asleep sometimes, and I try taking various dietary supplements, but I really miss the times when I could sleep without them. For example, for about two months now, maybe even longer, I can only fall asleep at night around 3, 4, sometimes 5 in the morning, and I wake up around 9 or 10 in the morning feeling unrested. I'm quite aware that I'm not getting enough sleep, that I'm not entering REM sleep, so when I wake up I don't feel rested; it's just like I've only closed my eyes for a little while and then opened them again, and all day long I'm living sleepy. If anyone has experienced a similar problem before, or has recently encountered one and found a solution, and can offer help, I would be very grateful.
Ps. I also attribute this to the level of fatigue my body experiences during the day. Perhaps if I tire my body out too much, I might inevitably be able to sleep long and restfully, but I don't want to tire myself out just for that reason.Is there no other way besides taking supplements or overexerting myself? I want natural things, or I'm looking for a natural solution.
I work nights and recently graduated so I no longer have any scheduled responsibilities during the day. I like my set up because I can still sleep a reasonable amount and I do have the time to take care of myself, but every morning, regardless of how much sleep I’ve gotten, I cannot will myself to be upright. Like I need to shower, clean, run errands etc. but I can’t get myself to stand in the shower. I have ADHD and depression and have been on the same medication and dosage for like 6 years but I always feel like I’m craving something that I can’t identify- like a jolt to the system or some stimulation. I work in the service industry and have always preformed best under pressure and I think I need to incorporate some sort of cortisol spike into my mornings so that I can actually get up.
I guess that exercise is the no-brainer solution but I’m terrible at self motivating, discipline, and consistency and my job is already someone physically demanding. I also can’t afford to pay for a gym membership if I’m not positive that id actually go, and it’s hot as fuck where I live.
TLDR: I’m wondering if anyone has a recommendation of a low-effort way to jolt myself awake everyday so that I can be a functioning human in the hours before I have to go to work.
* probably not actually me but AI voice bot
On paper I'm a very productive person but my family & partner knows that I've ALWAYS hated waking up, it's embarrassing. I turn into a different person in the morning no matter how much sleep I get! Especially on WFH days where there's no "real" need to be up early. No alarm or app has ever worked. Not even to mention the bed rot...
This idea came to mind when a few days ago one of my friends called me at 9am and I had to pick up & sound "awake", and it pushed me to get out of bed & on with the day. I guess the tinge of embarrassment worked. So would anyone do this?
I want to be upfront: I built the app I'm about to talk about. Downvote me if that's disqualifying. But I'm in this sub because I belong in this sub, and I think the thing I learned building it is worth more than the app itself.
For about two years I was the person this subreddit is for. Five alarms. Phone across the room, which just taught me to walk across the room asleep. Sunrise lamp. The app that makes you scan a barcode in the bathroom to shut it up. I beat every single one of them, unconscious, and then lost the entire morning anyway.
Here's what I eventually figured out, and it's obvious in hindsight: none of those target the actual problem. They all attack the moment the alarm goes off. By then it's already lost. The failure happened seven hours earlier, when I lay in bed with my brain running at full speed and didn't fall asleep until 3am. You cannot willpower your way out of a sleep debt you incurred last night.
So I stopped trying to fix mornings and started trying to fix the 45 minutes before sleep.
What actually moved the needle was having a consistent, physical wind-down signal, the same sound, at the same time, every night. Not music, because music has structure and my brain follows structure. Not silence, because silence is where my thoughts get loud. Something engineered to be uninteresting enough to sink into and steady enough that my body learned to read it as this is the part where we stop.
That's what I built. It's called Nocturne. Live-synthesised binaural and isochronic tones layered under procedural ambiences, nothing is a looped MP3, it's all generated in real time, so it never repeats and your brain never latches onto a seam. There's a 7-night reset that walks your sleep onset earlier in steps instead of demanding you go to bed three hours earlier tonight, which never works and just makes you lie there resenting yourself.
The thing I'm actually proud of, and the reason it's different from the twenty other apps in this category: you can build your own sounds from scratch. Pick the carrier frequency, pick the beat, layer your own ambience underneath, tune the mix. Every other app in this space hands you eleven preset tracks and a subscription. Sleep isn't one-size-fits-all, the thing that knocks me out makes other people anxious. So Nocturne lets you design the thing rather than shop from a menu.
What I'll promise and what I won't. I'm not going to tell you this cures anything, because this sub has heard enough of that from people selling things. What I'll say is: it gave me a repeatable ritual, it pulled my sleep onset from 3am to around midnight over a couple of weeks, and mornings stopped being a war. If your problem is a diagnosed circadian disorder or depression, this is a supporting tool, not a treatment — I'd be an idiot to claim otherwise to a room full of people who've lived it.
It's free to try. There's a real free tier, you don't need to pay to find out whether it does anything for you.
https://apps.apple.com/se/app/nocturne-binaural-waves/id6789258003?l=en-GB
So I heavily struggle waking up to alarms and don’t want to disturb my roommate with constant alarms. I’ve seen the “HiStrips” wristband alarms and I wanted to ask if anybody has actually tried it? Does it work well and is it worth it?
Bedroom advice usually starts with the mattress and ends with blackout curtains, but the room itself matters just as much.
My basic checklist now is:
Light
Blackout curtains help at night, but I still want some daylight during the day so the room does not feel like a cave.
Noise
A steady fan or white-noise machine is easier to ignore than traffic that starts and stops.
Temperature
A cooler room usually feels more comfortable, but blasting the AC does not automatically make a closed room feel fresh.
Humidity
Too dry can be irritating, while too humid makes the room feel heavy. A small hygrometer is more useful than guessing.
Air movement
A ceiling fan or floor fan can stop one side of the room from feeling stagnant.
Air quality
An air purifier may help with dust, pollen or pet dander, but it still recirculates indoor air. If the room feels stale every morning, ventilation may be the missing part.
I saw cozeware freshflow mentioned while reading about single-room ventilation for rentals.It's a pre-launch window-mounted fresh air system, so for a bedroom I'd mainly want to know about noise, the window seal, filter cost, and how much it affects room temperature.
A new mattress can help with comfort, but it cannot fix a room that is noisy, humid, overheated or poorly ventilated.