Wake tones
Annoying alarm sounds
The annoying alarm is the most popular bad idea in waking up, and the interesting part is that it fails on a schedule you can almost set your watch by.
In short
An unbearable alarm tone works for roughly a week. After that you learn to silence it before you are properly conscious, and you are back where you started with a worse mood attached. The durable fix is not a harsher sound, it is making the alarm end somewhere your half-asleep self cannot reach.
- Ways an alarm can end
- 9Ways an alarm can endA mission, never a swipe
- Mission families
- 3Mission familiesMind, body and place
- Smart wake window
- 30 minSmart wake windowRings early at a lighter moment
Nothing to play on this page
This page is about a kind of wake tone rather than one specific sound, so there is no single clip to put here. Beacon, Kalimba, Marimba and Musicbox all have one.
How it rings
An annoying tone leads with a hard clicky attack pitched into the range that makes people wince, repeats with no gap to relax into, and stops being tolerable in under three seconds, which is deliberate and also exactly why you learn to kill it in your sleep.
Week one it works, week three it does not
The first mornings on a genuinely irritating tone are spectacular. You are up instantly, you tell people about it, you feel like you have solved something permanent.
Then it wears through. Not because the sound got quieter, but because you have practised the same escape hundreds of times and your sleeping brain got good at it. The tone still hurts. It just no longer requires you to be awake.
No player on this page, and no plans for one. Making you listen to a klaxon would not tell you anything useful.
Turning off an alarm is a habit, and habits run without you
You have swiped that same spot on the screen thousands of times. That is a well-worn motor routine, and routines that worn do not need consciousness to execute. This is why people find alarms turned off that they have no memory of touching.
A harsher sound does nothing about this. It makes the reflex more urgent, which if anything trains it faster.
Make the ending hard rather than the sound
Tock keeps the alarm ringing until you finish a wake-up mission. Nine of them, in three families: mind, with maths, digits, tiles, ordering and phrases; body, with shaking the phone or walking a set number of steps; and place, where you photograph a spot you saved or scan a barcode somewhere in the flat.
A place mission is the strongest of them, because it needs you standing somewhere that is not your bed before anything goes quiet. By then the argument about whether you are getting up is already over.
- Put the phone out of arm's reach, so the mission and the walk happen together
- Choose a mission you cannot do with your eyes closed, and leave it alone after a bad week
- Keep a tone you can live with, since you are going to hear it every morning for months
A tone you do not resent is easier to keep
There is a hidden cost to the horrible alarm: you start dreading it at bedtime, and dreading the morning is not a great way to fall asleep. People end up delaying bed to put off the sound, which produces exactly the shortfall that made mornings hard in the first place.
Something clear and unhostile like Beacon, plus a mission you cannot fake, plus smart wake finding a lighter moment in the last 30 minutes, holds up far longer than anything designed purely to be unbearable.
Who should set this one
Worth setting if
- People who have already tried every harsh tone and are still oversleeping
- Anyone who wakes with no memory of turning the alarm off
- Sleepers whose current alarm has stopped registering at all
- Households where a klaxon is not an option anyway
Pair it with a mission
MathWake-up mission
If a harsh tone is the only thing that has ever worked on you, the honest upgrade is a milder tone plus Math turned up. Arithmetic is the one thing on the list you cannot bluff your way through with your eyes half shut.
All nine missionsQuestions people ask
What is the most annoying alarm sound?
Anything with a hard attack pitched high and repeating fast, which is the same recipe as a smoke detector. It also stops working on you within a couple of weeks, which is why it is not the answer.
Why do I turn my alarm off in my sleep?
Because dismissing it is a motor habit you have repeated hundreds of times, and habits that practised do not need you awake to run. Requiring a mission before the ringing stops is what breaks the loop.
Does Tock have an alarm you cannot turn off?
Alarms keep ringing until you finish the mission you set. Nine missions across mind, body and place, and the place ones need you out of bed and in another room before anything goes quiet.
Is a loud alarm better than an annoying one?
Slightly, and neither is the fix. A clear tone at a sensible volume plus a mission you cannot do half asleep beats both, and you will still be using it in six months.
Other wake tones
Eighteen ship with the app. These are the ones worth reading about first.
- Loud alarm soundsTock's alarms ring through silent mode and through a Focus because they are built on Apple's AlarmKit, not on an app keeping audio alive in the background. What no app can do is raise your iPhone's hardware volume for you. Loudness gets your eyes open; the wake-up mission is what stops you dismissing it and going straight back to sleep.
- BeaconBeacon is a wake tone in Tock: an evenly spaced two-note pulse that your ear identifies as an alarm almost immediately. Tock's alarms are built on Apple's AlarmKit, so Beacon rings on the native full-screen alert even when the phone is on silent, sitting in a Focus, or the app hasn't been opened since last night.
- Custom alarm soundTock comes with 18 wake tones, and if none of them suit you it takes your own audio as the alarm instead. Whatever you choose still gets scheduled through Apple's AlarmKit, so the silent switch, an active Focus and a fully closed app have no bearing on whether it rings.
- MarimbaMarimba is the rounded wooden-bar tone everybody recognises from stock phone alarms, and Tock ships its own version of it. Familiarity cuts both ways: your brain identifies it instantly, and it has also had years of practice sleeping through it. The alarm itself still rings on Apple's AlarmKit, so silent mode and a Focus change nothing.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Head to headCalm vs Sleep CycleIf the problem is lying awake with a busy head, Calm. If the problem is groggy mornings and having no idea what your nights look like, Sleep Cycle. Most people searching this have already decided which; they just have not said it out loud.
- FeaturesApple HealthTock reads Apple Health for sleep, heart rate, resting heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen, respiratory rate and wrist temperature, and shows them on the night they belong to. It can also write its own nights back into Health, but that setting defaults to off.
- Sleep soundsLate cafeA cafe bed works because a room with people in it reads as safe, and it only keeps working while none of the voices are intelligible. The moment you can pick out a word you start following it, and following language is the opposite of falling asleep, which is why Tock generates the murmur instead of recording a real room.
- Tock for youSnorersSomeone has told you that you snore, or you have woken yourself up doing it, and you have no idea how loud it really is or whether it is the kind of thing that matters.
- AlternativesTock vs Sleep as AndroidSleep as Android is Android only, so an iPhone owner cannot have it at any price. Tock is the nearest thing on iOS in spirit: sleep tracking from the phone, a smart wake window, snore detection and a task before the alarm stops. It is not as deep, and it does not talk to your smart bulbs.
- RoundupsThe best sleep apps for studentsFor most students the best answer is free: the iPhone Clock app, a wake time you keep at weekends, and Alarmy's free tier if you sleep through things. Tock is the paid pick worth the money once you have tried that and still miss 9am lectures.
An alarm that rings on silent, and then asks for something
Tock is built on Apple AlarmKit, so it rings through silent mode and a Focus with the app closed. Then it keeps ringing until you solve one of nine missions.