Written for
Nine o'clock lectures after a three o'clock finish
Nothing about term time is regular. A 9am on Tuesday, nothing until two on Wednesday, a deadline that eats Thursday night, and a room you share with somebody who did not agree to your alarm.
In short
You 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.
- wake-up missions, so the snooze is not an option
- 9wake-up missions, so the snooze is not an option
- sounds layered into one mix
- 4sounds layered into one mixEnough to cover a corridor at two in the morning
- languages the whole app speaks
- 33languages the whole app speaks
Irregular costs you more than short does
One in bed on Monday, four on Tuesday, eleven on Wednesday, then up at seven for a seminar. Your body clock is being asked to move several hours every couple of days, which is close to what a few time zones of travel would do to it.
That is why a week of six-hour nights at the same times can feel better than a week that averages seven and a half at random hours. The regularity is doing work the total never sees.
Cheap things that actually work
None of this needs money, which is the point.
- Pick one wake time and hold it, weekends included. Let the bedtime drift instead. It is the only part of the schedule you can genuinely control.
- Daylight in the first hour after waking, even through a window on a grey morning.
- Stop caffeine about eight hours before bed. Half of it is still in you six hours later.
- Do not work in bed. In a single room it feels unavoidable, and a desk in the corner is still worth the hassle.
- If you are pulling an all-nighter every week, the fix is your deadline schedule, not your alarm.
Waking up without waking your roommate
Your phone is on silent because it lives in lectures and libraries, and you will forget to switch it back. Tock rings anyway, because it uses AlarmKit and the alarm behaves like a system alarm rather than an app playing audio.
Volume is the wrong lever in a shared room in any case. Nine wake-up missions across mind, body and place mean the alarm ends when you have done something, not when you have found the snooze in the dark. Put the phone by the door and the Steps mission gets you out of bed before your roommate has fully woken up.
What it costs, plainly
There is no free tier. You get a three day trial after onboarding, then it is a subscription, from $39.99 a year. That is the whole story and it is worth knowing before you install anything.
The app is in 33 languages, which matters more than it sounds if you are studying away from home and would rather not read about your sleep in your second language at 2am.
There is no student pricing. If money is tight this month, that is a real reason to wait.
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 missionsIn a shared room you cannot just make it louder. A mission that needs you upright and across the floor ends the noise faster than volume ever would.
- Alarm on silentYour phone is muted for a two hour seminar and stays muted until Thursday. The alarm does not care what the switch says.
- Smart wakeA 9am after a 3am finish is going to hurt whatever happens. Ringing a few minutes early at a lighter moment still beats being pulled out of deep sleep at exactly 07:30.
- Sleep soundsHalls are loud at two in the morning. Layer four sounds into one mix and you have something that covers a corridor without you having to hear a loop restart.
- Sleep scoreYou already know the irregular weeks are worse. The score puts a number on how much worse, which is more persuasive at 1am than a resolution is.
Where Tock will not help
- There is no free tier and no student rate. Three day trial, then from $39.99 a year.
- An alarm cannot create sleep you did not get. Four hours plus nine missions is still four hours, and the missions only decide whether you are upright for it.
- Missions with sound and a phone across the room will wake whoever else is in there. Agree it with them before the first morning, not after.
- If you are exhausted every day regardless of how long you sleep, that is worth a GP appointment rather than another app. 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
Is there a student discount?
No. Pricing is the same for everyone: a three day trial after onboarding, then from $39.99 a year. There is no free tier to fall back on either, so start the trial when you can actually give it a fortnight.
Will the alarm wake my roommate?
Probably, if you sleep in the same room. What you can control is how long it rings for. A mission that gets you out of bed on the first ring is quieter overall than five snoozes, and you can pick a wake tone or use your own audio.
Does Tock work if my schedule is different every day?
Yes. Nothing depends on a fixed bedtime. Tracking follows the sleep you actually take, and the insights are built to show you the pattern across weeks rather than judge any single night.
Other situations
The same problem seen from a different bed.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Wake timesWaking up at 4:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 4:00am alarm.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 1:00amWhere to put the alarm after a 1:00am lights-out.
- Sleep by ageHow much sleep adults needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that adults sleep 7 or more hours per night on a regular basis to promote optimal health. It is expressed as a minimum rather than a range because the evidence supports a lower bound far more firmly than it supports an ideal figure.
- NapsThe 20 minute napA 20 minute nap is the standard recommendation because it produces a solid alertness benefit while ending before most people reach slow wave sleep, so you wake up clear rather than groggy. It is long enough to be worth the time and short enough to stay safe.
- 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 headthe iPhone Clock app vs Apple Health SleepThis isn't a choice. The Clock app is the alarm and Apple's Sleep schedule is the plan around it, and if you wear an Apple Watch to bed the Sleep side is the only one of the two that records anything at all.
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.