Wake times
If your alarm is set for 6:00am, when should you go to bed?
Six is the alarm most working schedules land on once the commute, the school run and the gym have all had their say. It is early enough to have a morning and late enough that the maths works out on a normal bedtime.
In short
To wake up at 6:00am feeling like you finished a cycle rather than got cut off inside one, go to bed at 10:15pm. That is 7h 30m of sleep across 5 full cycles, plus the fifteen minutes it takes most people to drop off. If you can get to bed at 8:45pm you get 9h, and 11:45pm still leaves you 6h.
- Lights out for a full night
- 10:15pmLights out 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 for falling asleep
- 0h 15mAdded for falling asleepMost calculators forget this
| Cycles | Lights out | Time asleep | What it is good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | 8:45pm | 9h | A long night. Worth aiming at if you are paying back sleep debt or training hard. |
| 5 | 10:15pmAim here | 7h 30m | The target most adults should hold on a normal week. |
| 4 | 11:45pm | 6h | Short, but a whole number of cycles, so you surface from a lighter patch. |
| 3 | 1:15am | 4h 30m | An emergency night. Fine occasionally, damaging as a pattern. |
Six in the morning is the default, and that is why it works
A 6am alarm asks for a 10:15pm bedtime to get five cycles in. That is close to when a lot of people already fall asleep, which is why this hour survives contact with real life better than anything earlier. There is no heroic evening rearrangement required, only a fairly ordinary one.
It also lines up with the natural end of the last full cycle for a lot of body clocks, which is why some people on a stable 6am schedule start waking up a few minutes before the alarm. That is a good sign, not a wasted alarm.
- Five cycles: bed at 10:15pm
- Six cycles: bed at 8:45pm
- If you regularly wake at 5:50 without an alarm, your schedule is working
The last cycle before six is where mornings are won or lost
Between roughly 4am and your alarm, sleep is lighter and more of it is REM. Being pulled out of a light patch feels completely different from being pulled out of deep sleep, and it is the whole reason two people who both slept seven hours can feel nothing alike.
Tock watches the thirty minutes before six across two channels, movement from the accelerometer and sound from the microphone, and rings a little early if it finds a lighter moment. Six is still the fallback and it will never let you sleep past it.
The table is an average, and your night is not
Ninety minutes is the number everyone quotes because it is the mean. In a real night your first cycle tends to run short, the middle ones stretch, and by the last hour before 6:00amyou are cycling faster and spending more of it in light sleep and REM. So the table gets you to roughly the right bedtime, and then the last half hour is a coin toss.
That last half hour is the entire argument for a smart alarm. Tock watches the thirty minutes before 6:00am on two channels, movement from the accelerometer and sound from the microphone, and rings a little early if it finds a lighter moment. If it does not find one,6:00am rings exactly as you set it. You can read more inhow smart wake works, or start withsleep cycles explained if the arithmetic above is the part you want to understand properly.
Questions people ask
What time should I go to bed to wake up at 6am?
For five full cycles, 10:15pm. For six, 8:45pm. Both include about fifteen minutes to fall asleep, so if you are still reading at 10:15 the maths has already moved.
Is 6am a good time to wake up?
It is the most sustainable early alarm for most people, because the bedtime it requires does not demand a different social life. Whether it feels good depends far more on whether you are consistent about it than on the hour itself.
Why do I wake up at 5:50 without an alarm?
Because your body clock has learned the schedule and is releasing cortisol ahead of the wake time you keep. It is a sign the routine has settled. Nothing is wrong, and there is no need to set the alarm later to reclaim those ten minutes.
Should I get up straight away at 6am or lie in for a bit?
Get up. Lying in after a 6am alarm usually means falling back into a light cycle you then get pulled out of again twenty minutes later, which is why the second wake often feels worse than the first.
Other wake times
The same maths, run for a different alarm.
- Waking up at 4:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 4:00am alarm.
- Waking up at 4:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 4:30am alarm.
- Waking up at 5:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 5:00am alarm.
- Waking up at 5:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 5:30am alarm.
- Waking up at 6:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 6:30am alarm.
- Waking up at 7:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 7:00am alarm.
- Waking up at 7:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 7:30am alarm.
- Waking up at 8:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 8:00am alarm.
- Waking up at 8:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 8:30am alarm.
- Waking up at 9:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 9:00am alarm.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- 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 headCalm vs PzizzIf you nap, or if hearing the same recording twice ruins it for you, Pzizz is the better buy. If you want big-name narrators and a library that carries you through the daytime too, Calm is the deeper product.
- 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.
- Sleep soundsGentle windWind is broadband noise shaped by whatever it is moving past, drifting slowly up and down in level with no rhythm your ear can lock onto, which makes it unusually easy to stop noticing. It masks gently rather than firmly, so it belongs in a wind-down more than it belongs in a fight with a busy street.
- Tock for youTravellers 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.
- AlternativesTock vs the iPhone Clock appIf you want an alarm and nothing else, keep the Clock app. Tock rings on the same Apple framework it does, so the reliability argument is a draw. Tock is only worth paying for if you want the night before the alarm to change when it goes off, and you want a morning report and a mission before it stops.
An alarm at 6:00am does not have to feel like 6:00am
Tock watches the half hour before your alarm and rings a little early if it finds a lighter moment. Your set time is always the fallback, so you are never late.