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You sleep when the world is awake
Your shift ends and everybody else's day is starting. You go to bed in daylight, in a building that is fully awake, and set an alarm you have to hear over a house that has no idea you are asleep. That is a harder problem than an early start, and it deserves to be treated like one.
In short
You 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.
- night, even when it breaks in two
- 1night, even when it breaks in twoSleep at 8am and again at 4pm and Tock still counts one night
- window smart wake watches before your alarm
- 30 minwindow smart wake watches before your alarm
- fall-asleep sounds for a loud afternoon
- 63fall-asleep sounds for a loud afternoon
Daylight is doing most of the damage
Light is the strongest signal your body clock has, and at 8am it is telling you the opposite of what you need. Melatonin is falling, core body temperature is climbing, and everything inside you is preparing for a day you are trying to sleep through.
So daytime sleep runs shorter and lighter than the same hours at night. You wake after four or five hours feeling finished rather than rested, and the hours you did get were doing less work than the clock suggests.
The things that help are mostly not apps
Worth saying before anything about Tock: the biggest wins here are physical and social, and they are cheap.
- A blackout blind, or a proper contoured eye mask if the blind is not an option. Tape over the standby lights too.
- Sunglasses on the way home, especially on a bright morning. The drive home is where a lot of the damage happens.
- Keep the bedroom cold. A room that heats up through the afternoon will wake you at hour four.
- Pick one block of hours you protect on every day of the rota, including days off, and build the rest of your sleep around it.
- Tell the household when your night is, in hours, on the fridge. Most daytime interruptions are people not knowing.
- If you are nodding off on the drive home, talk to a doctor. That is not a scheduling problem.
A night that starts at 8am is still a night
Tock does not assume you sleep after midnight. Tracking runs against the sleep you actually take, so a block from 08:10 to 13:40 is logged as your night, with its stretches, its sounds and its stats in the per-night view.
And when the block breaks in two, which on a night rota it usually does, that still counts as one night. Sleep from 8am to noon, get up for two hours, go back down until 5pm, and Tock puts the pieces together instead of scoring you twice for one bad day.
Stage estimates come from the phone alone, so read them as a rough shape rather than a measurement.
Waking up in a house that is already awake
Your phone probably lives on Do Not Disturb while you sleep, because otherwise a delivery driver decides when your night ends. Tock is built on Apple's AlarmKit, so the alarm is a system alarm: it rings on silent, through a Focus, with the app closed, on the native full-screen alert.
Then it keeps ringing until you solve something. That matters more on a rota than it does for anyone else, because dismissing an alarm at 3pm on four hours of sleep is exactly the kind of thing you will do with no memory of it.
A rota reads better by the week than by the night
Any single day on nights looks like a disaster. The useful view is the run: how much sleep debt you accumulated across four shifts, whether your worst sleeps cluster on the first night or the last, whether the days off are actually recovering anything.
That is what the insights are for here. Twenty-one metrics, a calendar heatmap, and tags you can attach to a night so you can see whether the coffee at 4am is costing you the afternoon.
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.
- Alarm on silentYour phone stays on Do Not Disturb all day so the doorbell cannot end your night early. The alarm is a system alarm and rings anyway, full screen, with the app closed.
- Sleep trackingIt tracks the block you actually sleep in, whenever that lands. Sleep at 8am and again at 4pm and the two go back together as one night rather than two failures.
- Smart wakeDaytime sleep runs lighter and breaks up more, so there are usually plenty of light moments in the last half hour for it to catch.
- Sleep soundsSomething steady to put over the traffic, the neighbours and the rest of the house at two in the afternoon. Sixty-three of them, four layered at a time.
- Sleep scoreNight by night a rota is unreadable. A score you can compare across a whole run of shifts tells you which of your sleeps are actually working.
Where Tock will not help
- No app fixes circadian misalignment. Working nights keeps your body clock and your schedule in permanent disagreement, and the most Tock can do is help you sleep well inside a situation that is working against you.
- Daytime sleep is lighter and more broken, so the phone-only stage estimates get noisier. Read the totals and the stretches, not the stage split.
- Smart wake needs a reasonably settled half hour to look at. On four hours in a busy house it will often just ring at your set time.
- If you are microsleeping on the drive home, or sleeping badly on every single day off as well, that is a conversation for a doctor. Tock is not a medical device.
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
Can Tock track my sleep during the day?
Yes. Tracking follows the sleep you take rather than the clock, so a block from 08:00 to 14:00 is your night and gets the same stretches, stats and recordings as anyone else's.
Will the alarm ring if my phone is on Do Not Disturb all day?
It will. Tock's alarms are built on AlarmKit, so they behave like system alarms: through silent, through a Focus, with the app closed, on the native full-screen alert.
I sleep in two blocks after a night shift. Does that wreck my stats?
No. Tock treats a night broken in two as one night, so the pieces are added up and the per-night view shows both stretches instead of counting the second one as a nap you failed to take.
Does Tock have a night shift mode?
There is no separate mode, because there does not need to be one. Alarms are alarms whatever hour you set them for, and tracking works off your actual sleep rather than an assumed bedtime.
Other situations
The same problem seen from a different bed.
- Rotating shift nursesYour rota moves you from days to nights and back again, sometimes inside the same week, and there is no schedule to settle into because the schedule keeps changing. Every adjustment gets interrupted by the next one.
- 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.
- 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.
- Travellers with jet lagYou landed, you are on local time on paper, and your body is running four or eight hours behind. Wide awake at 3am, unusable at 3pm, and it lasts roughly a day per time zone.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 1:30amWhere to put the alarm after a 1:30am lights-out.
- Sleep by ageHow much sleep toddlers needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that children aged 1 to 2 years sleep 11 to 14 hours per 24 hours, including naps, on a regular basis. Most of that has consolidated into the night by the second birthday, with one daytime nap doing the rest.
- NapsThe 10 minute napA 10 minute nap lifts alertness without taking you into slow wave sleep, so you wake up clear rather than groggy. It is the safest nap to take close to work or driving, and it does nothing for memory consolidation, which needs considerably longer.
- Wake tonesGentle alarm soundsA gentle alarm works when it catches you at a light moment and fails when it lands in the heaviest part of your night, which is a timing problem rather than a volume one. Tock watches movement and sound across the 30 minutes before your alarm and rings early at a lighter moment if it finds one, with your set time as the fallback.
- Head to headAlarmy vs Sleep CyclePick Alarmy if you sleep through alarms and need one you can't beat. Pick Sleep Cycle if you wake up on time but feel wrecked when you do, and you want a gentler window plus a record of the night.
- 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.