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Louder was never the answer
Volume is the first thing everyone tries and the first thing that stops working. Three alarms, two phones and a speaker across the room, and you still surfaced at 09:20 with no memory of any of it.
In short
You have slept through alarms you definitely heard, and turned some of them off without ever waking up. The problem is not your hearing. The part of you that swipes an alarm away is awake several minutes before the part of you that makes decisions.
- missions across mind, body and place
- 9missions across mind, body and place
- window smart wake watches
- 30 minwindow smart wake watchesYour set time is always the fallback
- wake tones, or bring your own audio
- 18wake tones, or bring your own audio
You did hear it, you just were not there yet
Being pulled out of deep sleep leaves you in sleep inertia: awake enough to reach, tap and swipe, nowhere near awake enough to remember doing it or to weigh up whether it was a good idea. It can last fifteen to thirty minutes, and it hits hardest when the alarm lands in the deepest part of a cycle.
That is why louder does not fix it. A louder alarm gets dismissed by the same half-awake person, a bit faster. What breaks the loop is making the dismissal require something that autopilot cannot do.
Make turning it off take an actual decision
Tock keeps ringing until you solve something, and the nine missions sit in three families so you can pick one your half-asleep self genuinely cannot fake.
- Body: Steps counts real steps on the pedometer, so the sound stops when you have walked, not when you have promised to.
- Place: Photo makes you stand in front of a spot you saved, the kettle or the bathroom mirror. Barcode wants the cereal box in your hand.
- Mind: Math, Digits, Tiles, Order and Phrase, for people who wake up sharp and just need one thing to hold on to.
Pick a family you are bad at when tired. A mission you can beat asleep is decoration.
Wake at a lighter moment and the task is easy
Missions solve the dismissal. Smart wake solves the reason it was hard. In the 30 minutes before your alarm Tock watches for a light moment, using movement from the accelerometer and sound from the microphone, and rings a little early if it finds one. Your set time is always the fallback, so nothing is ever missed.
Woken from a lighter moment, the mission takes fifteen seconds. Woken out of deep sleep, the same mission feels like an unreasonable request from a stranger.
The parts that are not the alarm
Before you turn the mission difficulty up, spend two weeks on these.
- Hold the same wake time every day. After a week or two your body starts preparing to wake before the alarm, and you are less deep at that hour.
- Go to bed twenty minutes earlier for a week. A lot of heavy sleeping is a sleep debt problem wearing a costume.
- Put the phone where standing up is the only way to reach it.
- If you sleep nine hours and still cannot be woken, that is worth a doctor looking at rather than a harder alarm.
The parts of Tock that apply to you
Not all of it will. These are the ones that do something specific about the problem above.
- Wake-up missionsSteps and Photo cannot be finished in bed. That is the entire mechanism: the sound stops when you are upright in another room, not when your hand finds the screen.
- Smart wakeBeing lifted straight out of deep sleep is why the mission feels impossible. Ringing at a lighter moment in the last half hour makes it solvable instead of a wall.
- Alarm on silentYou will never lose a morning to a Focus you forgot to turn off. It fires on the native full-screen alert with the app closed, whatever the switch on the side is doing.
- Sleep soundsEighteen wake tones, or your own audio. A tone you have not yet learned to sleep through is worth more than the same one turned up.
- StreaksGetting up is a habit you build, not a decision you win at 07:00. The early milestones at 3, 7 and 14 nights are where it starts to feel less like a fight.
Where Tock will not help
- A determined half-asleep person can beat a mission they have done a hundred times. When Math stops working, change family rather than turning the difficulty up.
- Smart wake will not always find a light moment. On a short or restless night your set time is the fallback and it rings exactly then, which is the morning you already know.
- If you sleep nine hours and still cannot be woken, or you fall asleep during the day without meaning to, that is a doctor's question. Tock is not a medical device and does not assess anything.
Tock estimates your sleep and is not a medical device. Nothing it shows you is a diagnosis, and anything that worries you is a conversation for a doctor rather than an app.
Questions people ask
Why does a louder alarm stop working?
Because the problem is not that you cannot hear it. In the first minutes after deep sleep you can reach and swipe without forming a memory, so a louder alarm just gets dismissed by the same half-awake person. A task that needs you standing somewhere else is what breaks that.
I turn my alarm off in my sleep. Does a mission really stop that?
It stops the easy version. Steps needs real steps on the pedometer and Photo needs you standing in front of a place you saved, and by the time you have done either of those you are usually properly awake. Mind missions are easier to beat on autopilot once you have done them often enough.
Will Tock ring if my phone is on silent?
Yes. The alarm is built on AlarmKit, so it behaves like a system alarm: through silent, through a Focus, with the app closed, on the full-screen alert.
Should I use smart wake if I struggle to get up at all?
Yes, and it is on by default. It only ever rings inside the 30 minutes before your alarm and never later than the time you set, so the worst case is the alarm you would have had anyway.
Other situations
The same problem seen from a different bed.
- People who hate morningsThe alarm goes off and you feel physically wrong. Not tired exactly, more like you were pulled out of something, and it takes the better part of an hour before you are a person again.
- StudentsYou go to bed at a different time every night, set an alarm you already know you will sleep through, and you cannot just turn the volume up because there is someone asleep two metres away.
- Night owlsYou are wide awake at 1am and useless at 7am, and every piece of advice you have ever read starts with going to bed earlier, which you have done, repeatedly, while staring at the ceiling.
- Early risersYou are up before your alarm most days, lying there working out whether to get up or risk another twenty minutes. On the days you go back to sleep, you feel worse than if you had just got out of bed.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 12:30amWhere to put the alarm after a 12:30am lights-out.
- Sleep by ageHow much sleep teenagers needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that teenagers aged 13 to 18 years sleep 8 to 10 hours per 24 hours on a regular basis. The obstacle is a genuine biological shift: the adolescent circadian rhythm runs later, so a teenager cannot reliably fall asleep at the time an early school start requires.
- NapsThe 90 minute napA 90 minute nap is approximately one full sleep cycle, which means it ends in a lighter stage rather than in slow wave sleep. That produces much less grogginess than a 30 or 60 minute nap, and it includes both the deep sleep and the REM that shorter naps miss.
- Wake tonesMarimbaMarimba 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.
- Head to headHeadspace Sleep vs PzizzIf you nap in the afternoon, or you get bored hearing the same track night after night, Pzizz. If you want to be taught how to wind down and to still be doing it in three months, Headspace Sleep.
- FeaturesSleep soundsTock has 63 fall-asleep sounds. You can play four at a time, save the blend as a mix, and 42 of them carry a Far, Near or Close distance control. 22 are bundled recordings and the rest are generated on the phone as you listen, so they never loop.
Start with the moment you get woken
It is the one part of your night you can change tonight. Tock waits for a lighter moment in the last half hour and rings a little early when it finds one.