Written for
An alarm for the four hours you actually get
Sleep stopped being a block and became a series of interruptions. Nobody warns you that the arithmetic is the worst part: lying awake at 4am working out how much is left, then getting up anyway.
In short
You do not wake up to an alarm any more, you wake up to a small person, three or four times, and then you have to be a functioning adult by seven. The night is not so much short as it is in pieces.
- night, however many times it broke
- 1night, however many times it broke
- wind-down steps, reorderable
- 6wind-down steps, reorderableRun the Short version and cut whatever does not help this month
- sounds for a 3am that will not end
- 63sounds for a 3am that will not end
Fragmented is not the same as short
Six hours in one stretch and six hours in four pieces are completely different nights. Every waking sends you back toward the start of a cycle, so the deep sleep that normally sits in the first half never accumulates the way it should.
Which is why the total looks survivable on paper and feels nothing like it. You are not being dramatic about a number that seems fine. The number was never the whole story.
The fix is not an app, and anyone saying otherwise is selling you something
In the first few months the only real lever is another adult taking a shift. Everything else is around the edges.
- Split the night so each of you gets one unbroken stretch, even if it is only four hours. One long piece beats two short ones.
- Take the earlier stretch when you can. The first half of the night carries more of the deep sleep.
- One decent nap is worth more than three interrupted ones. Protect one, drop the others.
- Lower the bar on everything that is not sleep. The dishes are not a health intervention.
- Ask for the help people keep vaguely offering, in specific hours.
- If the tiredness comes with feeling low, anxious or unlike yourself, tell your midwife, health visitor or doctor. That is a different thing and it is treatable.
Three broken hours still add up to a night
Tock puts a split night back together. Down at 22:40, up twice, out of bed at 03:10, back down until 06:30, and it is one night with its stretches drawn out rather than two half failures.
The per-night view is the useful part in this period. Not the score, not the stages, just the shape of what happened, so on the mornings you cannot tell whether it was genuinely awful or you are just wrecked, there is something to look at. And a wind-down set to Short is about three minutes, which is the only version that survives a newborn.
Keep the phone on the nightstand. Not in the bed, and never in the cot.
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.
- Sleep trackingIt records the stretches rather than one clean night, so a 4am that broke three times shows up as exactly that instead of a total that flatters it.
- Wind-downSet it to Short. Six steps is the full version, and you can reorder or cut the ones that do not fit, so bedtime takes three minutes and not a ceremony.
- Sleep soundsSomething steady while you try to get back down at 03:40, and the Far setting keeps it quiet enough that you can still hear the room.
- Smart wakeOn the rare morning you get an unbroken stretch, where inside it you are woken matters more than usual. It looks for a light moment rather than cutting a cycle in half.
Where Tock will not help
- Tock cannot give the sleep back. Nothing on a phone can. In the first months the only genuine fix is another adult taking a stretch.
- Stage estimates from a phone get unreliable on nights with a lot of waking. The stretches are the part worth reading; treat the stage split as a rough shape.
- If the baby sleeps in your room, the microphone will pick up both of you and some of what it hears will be attributed to the night generally rather than to a person.
- If the exhaustion comes with feeling low, anxious or unlike yourself, please speak to your midwife, health visitor or doctor. Tock is not a medical device and does not screen for 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
Will Tock still track a night I was up three times?
Yes, and that is rather the point. Every waking shows as a break in the stretches, and a night split in two stays one night rather than being counted as two short ones.
Is there any point tracking sleep this broken?
Some. It will not improve anything on its own, but it makes the bad weeks legible, and having a record of what the nights actually looked like is genuinely useful if you end up talking to a health visitor or a doctor about it.
Can I use it with the baby in the room?
You can. Keep the phone on the nightstand, never in the cot or the bed. The microphone will pick up the room as a whole, so treat anything it classifies as coming from the room rather than from one of you.
Will the alarm wake the baby?
It might. Choose one of the softer wake tones, or use your own audio, and keep the phone on your side of the bed. A mission that gets you up on the first ring keeps the whole thing shorter than snoozing does.
Other situations
The same problem seen from a different bed.
- Light sleepersYou wake at everything, and then you are awake for forty minutes at 3am doing arithmetic on how much is left. By morning you cannot say what woke you, only that something did, several times.
- 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.
- Night shift workersYou finish at 7am and try to sleep while the sun is up, the neighbours are drilling and your phone is on silent so nothing wakes you. Then you have to get up on time anyway, in the middle of what your body still thinks is the afternoon.
- Heavy sleepersYou 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.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- 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 coffee napA coffee nap means drinking caffeine and then immediately napping for about 20 minutes. Caffeine takes roughly 20 to 30 minutes to have a noticeable effect, so it does not stop you falling asleep quickly, and you wake as it takes hold. The two effects add rather than cancel.
- Wake tonesLoud 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.
- 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.
- FeaturesSleep coachThe sleep coach is a chat tab inside Tock that reads your recent nights before it answers. It can quote your score, play back a clip Tock recorded, and navigate the app to change a setting on your behalf. It needs a network connection.
- Sleep soundsFireplaceA fire is a soft broadband roar with sparse, sharp crackles laid on top, and those crackles are transients, precisely the kind of sudden sound a light sleeper surfaces for. It is one of the best wind-down sounds in the library and one of the weakest choices to leave running until morning.
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.