Bedtimes
You are going to bed at 2:00am. When should the alarm be?
Two in the morning is either a shift pattern, a very late chronotype or a night that got away from you, and the three of those want completely different advice. The table is the same for all of them; almost nothing else is.
In short
If you go to bed at 2:00am, set your alarm for 9:45am. That is 7h 30m of sleep across 5 full cycles, plus the fifteen minutes it takes most people to actually fall asleep, so you wake at the end of a cycle rather than inside one. 11:15am gives you 9h and 8:15am still leaves you 6h.
- Alarm for a full night
- 9:45amAlarm for a full night5 cycles, 7h 30m asleep
- Length of an average sleep cycle
- 90 minLength of an average sleep cycleReal ones run 70 to 120
- Added before the first cycle
- 0h 15mAdded before the first cycleMost calculators forget this
| Cycles | Set the alarm | Time asleep | What it is good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | 11:15am | 9h | Nine hours. Worth it if you are paying back debt, and more than most adults need every night. |
| 5 | 9:45amAim here | 7h 30m | The target most adults should hold on a normal week. |
| 4 | 8:15am | 6h | Six hours. Short, but a whole number of cycles, so you surface from a lighter patch. |
| 3 | 6:45am | 4h 30m | An emergency night. Fine occasionally, damaging as a pattern. |
Three different people arrive at 2am
The shift worker is sleeping at the time their rota assigns and the thing that matters most to them is darkness during the day and consistency across the week. The extreme evening type has always been like this and is fighting a clock rather than a habit. The third is somebody whose night simply ran on, and for them a 2am bedtime is an event rather than a schedule.
Almost all general sleep advice is written for none of them, which is why it reads as unhelpful. What is common across all three is that the sleep taken during daylight is more fragile: the circadian system is pushing for wakefulness, so the same number of hours delivers less.
- From 2am, five cycles lands at 10:45am and four at 9:15am
- Daytime sleep is lighter and more easily broken than the same hours at night
- Blackout and noise control matter more here than at any other bedtime on this list
Make the room do the work
When you are sleeping against your body clock, the environment stops being a nicety. Full blackout, a phone that is not a light source, and something covering the frequencies that carry a voice are worth more at this hour than any wind-down routine, because the thing waking you is usually the world rather than your own physiology.
A steady broadband sound is the part with the least argument behind it. It does not deepen sleep, and it does raise the floor so a door or a car no longer stands out enough to pull you up out of a light patch, which is precisely the failure mode of daytime sleep.
What sound can and cannot do is at /sounds, and the noise colours specifically at /glossary/noise-colors.
The table is an average, and your night is not
Ninety minutes is the number everybody quotes because it is roughly the mean. A real night does not run to it. Your first cycle tends to be short, the middle ones stretch, and by the last couple of hours you are cycling faster with more of each one spent in light sleep and REM. So the arithmetic above gets you to approximately the right alarm, and then the last half hour is a coin toss.
That coin toss is the entire argument for a smart alarm, and it is why this page ends with one rather than with a schedule. Tock spends the thirty minutes before 9:45am watching for the moment you are already stirring, on two channels: movement from the accelerometer and sound from the microphone. When it finds one it rings a little early. When it does not,9:45am rings exactly as you set it, so the fallback is never worse than a normal alarm. You can read the mechanism at how smart wake works, or start with sleep cycles explained if the arithmetic itself is the part you want to understand properly.
Questions people ask
What time should I wake up if I go to bed at 2am?
Five sleep cycles puts the alarm at 10:45am for seven and a half hours of sleep. Four cycles is 9:15am at six hours and three is 7:45am at four and a half. All include the fifteen minutes it takes to fall asleep.
Is sleeping from 2am to 10am as good as 10pm to 6am?
It is the same number of hours and it is usually not the same sleep. Sleeping through the morning means sleeping while your circadian system is pushing for wakefulness and while the world is loud and bright, so the sleep tends to be lighter and more broken unless the room is genuinely dark and quiet.
Is 2am a bad time to go to bed?
It is a hard time to go to bed well, mostly because of what happens afterwards rather than the hour itself. If you can get a full, dark, uninterrupted stretch after it, the arithmetic works. If your morning is claimed by daylight, noise or an alarm, it will deliver less sleep than the same hours would at night.
Other bedtimes
The same arithmetic, run from a different lights-out.
- Going to bed at 8:00pmWhere to put the alarm after a 8:00pm lights-out.
- Going to bed at 8:30pmWhere to put the alarm after a 8:30pm lights-out.
- Going to bed at 9:00pmWhere to put the alarm after a 9:00pm lights-out.
- Going to bed at 9:30pmWhere to put the alarm after a 9:30pm lights-out.
- Going to bed at 10:00pmWhere to put the alarm after a 10:00pm lights-out.
- Going to bed at 10:30pmWhere to put the alarm after a 10:30pm lights-out.
- Going to bed at 11:00pmWhere to put the alarm after a 11:00pm lights-out.
- Going to bed at 11:30pmWhere to put the alarm after a 11:30pm lights-out.
- Going to bed at 12:00amWhere to put the alarm after a 12:00am lights-out.
- Going to bed at 12:30amWhere to put the alarm after a 12:30am lights-out.
- Going to bed at 1:00amWhere to put the alarm after a 1:00am lights-out.
- Going to bed at 1:30amWhere to put the alarm after a 1:30am lights-out.
- Going to bed at 3:00amWhere to put the alarm after a 3:00am lights-out.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Wake timesWaking up at 4:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 4:30am alarm.
- Sleep by ageHow much sleep babies needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that infants aged 4 to 12 months sleep 12 to 16 hours per 24 hours, including naps, on a regular basis. Sleep at this age is spread across the day rather than consolidated into one block, and the total is what the recommendation is about.
- NapsThe 30 minute napA 30 minute nap frequently ends inside slow wave sleep, which produces the strongest sleep inertia of any nap length. That is the heavy, disoriented feeling that can take twenty minutes or more to clear, and it is why 20 minutes or a full 90 minute cycle are both better choices.
- 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 headAutoSleep vs SleepScoreIf an Apple Watch is already on your wrist at night, AutoSleep is the better tracker and it asks nothing of you. If you sleep bare-wristed and want to keep it that way, SleepScore is the only one of the two that can track you at all.
- 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.
Tomorrow, you wake up just before your alarm
Setting the alarm on a cycle boundary is arithmetic and your night is not. Tock watches the half hour before 9:45am for a lighter moment and rings then, and your set time is always the fallback.