Wake times
If your alarm is set for 7:00am, when should you go to bed?
Seven is the most-set alarm on the planet, which means it is also the most ignored one. Almost everyone reading this has hit snooze on a 7am alarm, and almost none of them were short of sleep by more than about forty minutes.
In short
To wake up at 7:00am feeling like you finished a cycle rather than got cut off inside one, go to bed at 11:15pm. 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 9:45pm you get 9h, and 12:45am still leaves you 6h.
- Lights out for a full night
- 11:15pmLights 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 | 9:45pm | 9h | A long night. Worth aiming at if you are paying back sleep debt or training hard. |
| 5 | 11:15pmAim here | 7h 30m | The target most adults should hold on a normal week. |
| 4 | 12:45am | 6h | Short, but a whole number of cycles, so you surface from a lighter patch. |
| 3 | 2:15am | 4h 30m | An emergency night. Fine occasionally, damaging as a pattern. |
The most common alarm is also the most snoozed
A 7am wake time asks for an 11:15pm bedtime to get five cycles, which is very close to when a lot of people actually turn the light off. On paper this schedule works. In practice the phone goes down at 11:50, the night runs six and a half hours, and the alarm arrives in the middle of a cycle rather than at the end of one.
That forty minute gap between the bedtime you intend and the bedtime you have is the single most common sleep problem there is, and it is far more fixable than a chronotype or a shift pattern.
- Five cycles: bed at 11:15pm
- Six cycles: bed at 9:45pm
- The gap between intended and actual bedtime is usually the whole problem
Fix the last hour and the alarm fixes itself
Nobody has ever decided to fall asleep. What you can decide is what the ninety minutes before bed look like, and that is the only part of this you control directly. A short repeatable sequence beats a long ambitious one, because you will still do it on a Tuesday when you are tired.
Tock's wind-down is six steps you can reorder and three lengths, and it ends with a thirty second drift rather than a screen. The good-night screen then dims itself to near black after twenty seconds so the phone stops being the brightest thing in the room.
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 7:00amyou 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 7:00am 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,7:00am 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 7am?
For five sleep cycles, 11:15pm. For six cycles, 9:45pm. If you want a simple rule, aim for lights out by eleven and you will land in the right range most nights.
Why am I still tired when I wake up at 7am?
Usually one of two things. Either the night was shorter than you think, because the gap between getting into bed and falling asleep is bigger than most people estimate, or the alarm caught you mid-cycle. Waking out of deep sleep feels like a completely different night from waking out of light sleep, even at identical duration.
Is 7am a healthy wake up time?
For most body clocks it sits comfortably in range, which is exactly why it is so common. There is no health benefit to moving it earlier, and a fair amount of evidence that keeping it the same every day matters more than where on the clock it sits.
How do I stop snoozing a 7am alarm?
Snoozing is a habit, not a sleep problem, and it usually means the first alarm is too easy to dismiss. Tock keeps ringing until you complete a task, and because it is built on Apple AlarmKit it rings on silent and through a Focus, so the usual escape routes are closed.
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 6:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 6:00am alarm.
- Waking up at 6:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 6:30am 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.
- Sleep soundsOceanRolling surf is broadband like rain, but it breathes, cresting and receding on a cycle of about ten seconds, and a lot of people find that slow rise easier to let go of than a flat hush. The cost is that the level moves, so it masks less reliably at the quiet end of every cycle than steady noise does.
- Tock for youNight 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.
- AlternativesTock vs SleepScoreSleepScore is the better pick if you want breathing and movement read contactlessly by a method you can have explained to you, and you already have an alarm you trust. Tock is the pick if you want one app that both tracks the night and wakes you, with playable audio of what it heard.
- RoundupsThe best free alarm apps for iPhoneThe best free alarm app for iPhone is the Clock app that came with it. It is free forever, it rings through silent mode and a Focus, and it has never failed. Alarmy is the best free option if you need an alarm that is hard to turn off. Tock is not free and is listed last for that reason.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 12:00amWhere to put the alarm after a 12:00am 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.
An alarm at 7:00am does not have to feel like 7:00am
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.