How can I overcome using the snooze function of my alarm clock? [closed]

Question

Every morning when my alarm clock wakes me up, I need very badly to use the snooze function which turns off the alarm for some minutes and starts it again. This costs me 10-40 minutes every morning...

It doesn't matter how long I sleep. I just can't resist using it, but I'd rather like to get up on the first alarm or at least after the first snooze. I tried to simply not use it, but it failed and I fell asleep and slept too long.

The problem isn't that big when I get up at around noon. I don't like to get up early in the morning, but I have to. The sleeping duration also doesn't matter a lot. If I set my clock to 7 am after 8 hours of sleep it's much harder than 11 am after 8 hours of sleep. This also doesn't change when I permanently sleep from 11 pm to 7 am.

Is there a good way to get rid of this habit?

Just to clarify: I'm looking for any method. May it be some physical hack (like using puzzle alarms or placing the clock unreachable from bed) or a mental/non-physical one(setting up an urgent ToDo right after the alarm goes). I write this because someone voted to close the question because it's off-topic (reason: it's a brain hack question).

Update (about answers): Thanks for the many good answers for now. A lot of them will help different types of people. The best for me so far are:

• setup a situation where I urgently need to stand up and stay awake.

• practicing/conditioning by repeating the go to bed and stand up on alarm-algorithm (Blog post from comments)

Answer 1

Obviously you do wake up and you are already in such a good shape that you manage to hit the snooze button (and not the finally-off button). So you might also realize that there is not yet an absolute need to get up immediately but you can post-pone this to some minutes later without much of a risk.

So that exactly is where your issue is. You need to pull yourself together to get up. Being sleepy is extremely counter-productive here.

What worked for me is to introduce an urgent need to get up right now, not a minute or two later. This can be achieved with two easy hacks:

1. Set the alarm to the latest possible time when you really really need to get up to just about make it to get to work in time. You know you will be late if you had pressed on snooze only once.

2. Do not use an alarm with a snooze button. You will then know that you will oversleep if you turn it off. This alone will help you a lot to actually get up, and not to go back to bed again.

Of course, if we are lucky, we can try to slowly re-adjust our sleep/wake cycle by getting to bed earlier. This can not be done with one or two tries but it needs several days if not weeks. It then may help to better wake up in the morning but it is at the cost of losing all our evenings (which was the main reason it did not work out for me).

Answer 2

Put the alarm clock on the other side of the room so you have to physically get up out of bed and turn it off.

If the device you use for an alarm clock supports multiple alarms also set another alarm to go off at one minute after the main target time so if you do just turn it off and go back to bed you will have to get up again more or less straightaway.

Answer 3

Use 12 alarm clocks, each one ringing 5 seconds after the previous one, and each one being further away than the last. This way, you would have to get up, walk over, shut off, go to bed, immediately get up, walk over, shut off, go to bed, immediately get up, walk over, shut off, etc. until you get to the point where the next one rings before you even get to bed and before you know it you're up.

Answer 4

Check emails and / or Facebook as soon as the alarm rings. We all have an urge to read the unread messages or look for notifications. This makes you read. Once you read, your mind wakes up... And it seems boring to go back to sleep as the mind is already awake and you can't sleep again, but just lying with eyes closed. Eventually, you just want to leave the bed and there is no point hitting snooze.

I always keep the laptop on and earphones plugged in. It distracts me from thinking about unnecessary things and go to sleep. When I want to wake up after the alarm rings, I check Facebook and emails.

Answer 5

The goal here is to make yourself wake up before you can turn off the alarm. There are a lot of ways to do that, one of which has already been suggested.

1. Move the alarm clock across the room. This is simple but may not be effective enough for you.
2. Buy a new alarm clock with an annoyance feature built in. There are alarm clocks that require you shoot a target, find a tiny drone it just fired, or find the entire clock which has rolled off somewhere. This option will cost you money but it will also ensure there's a delay between the alarm going off and you being able to hit snooze.
3. Build / buy a small box with plenty of holes to let out the noise. Put the alarm clock in the box and lock it shut, adding a clasp and padlock if the box doesn't have a lock. Put the key somewhere else like another room.
4. If you shower in the morning, put the alarm clock in your bathroom. You might decide that it's easier to get into the shower than back to bed as the shower is so close and hot water would be so nice right now.

Answer 6

Is there any good way to get rid of this habit?

Disable the snooze function. On some high-end alarms (and several smartphone apps) this is possible.

On most alarms, there is a dedicated button with a snooze function. A judicious application of Superglue will prevent the snooze button from ever working again. I'd recommend several very small applications leaving time for the glue to cure, to prevent Superglue from leaking into the clock's innards.

If it is a touch button or the button is flush and waterproof, you can find some rigid, flat object (e.g. a coin) that can be glued over it to prevent it from being activated. This has the advantage that the function can be restored afterwards.

Update: I have a Fitbit Flex thingy that can be set to vibrate on your wrist at a set time. It hasn't a snooze function and turning it off is next to impossible if it's inside a cloth bracelet. Any reprogramming requires flipping out a Bluetooth smartphone. If you're sensitive to a buzzer next to your skin, that might be an option. Of course you need to sleep with the thing on, which might not be everyone's cup of tea.

Answer 7

I find that putting my alarm away from my bed and immediately jumping into the shower works for me. The less I think about it the better. By the time I've realised I'm awake, I'm already half-ready to face the day.

Answer 8

The problem isn't that big when I get up at around noon.

Then the problem is your circadian rhythm, not the snooze bar.

The best advice I've ever heard, is that you can go to sleep whenever you want but you have to wake up at the same time every day regardless if you've the day off. Get yourself on a schedule and you will find it unavoidable to wake up to it, and you will feel better when you do.

Eventually, you'll start finding yourself awake before it even goes off the first time. The key to not wanting to hit the snooze bar is motivation. Mine is having enough time to brew my own coffee. Also, continued employment is nice...

I get the feeling you're a student, where being late is only a waste of your own money. You'll learn real quick, one way or another, how not to hit that bar later on in the real world.

Answer 9

Potentially a problem with "blue" light. Light from TV/tablet/phone keeps your brain active, as late into the night as you use them. I use apps like Twilight on Android, and another for my PC. Still working on a solution for TV.

Answer 10

My personal method is not to use a traditional alarm clock. They are typically not very configurable at all. Instead I use my android smartphone's alarm.

It gives me the option to enable or disable the snooze feature for each alarm: my morning alarm has it disabled.

You can also set a limit to the number of snoozes, and set the length of the snoozes, etc. So if you wanted to set your alarm for 15 minutes earlier, to allow yourself a single snooze of 15 minutes (9 minutes has never felt like the right length for me, but all alarm clocks use it!), you could.

It also has the feature to require me to solve a simple puzzle before turning off: press four randomly-numbered buttons in increasing order.

It also has the feature that I can set the alarm to something that slowly gets louder, rousing me gently, rather than jolting me and my wife awake.

With these features, I don't have a problem getting up. And I will never go back to a LED alarm clock with infinite 9-minute snoozes and a ghastly beeping alarm.

Answer 11

I solved this problem by eating three meals a day. Eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner shifted my circadian rhythm. I started waking up early without an alarm clock. I wake up early now because I am hungry. I have become a morning person.

It took months for my body to adjust, so do not expect instant results from this method. There is a lot of initial effort required in that you will have to force yourself to get up early to eat breakfast for a few weeks. Also, your stomach may not like having food thrown into it when it is not expecting it.

If you are in a hurry and miss breakfast one morning, make sure you eat lunch and dinner. You can also have a late breakfast as long as you still eat lunch and dinner. Try to eat dinner as early as possible without leaving yourself hungry at bedtime. If you are hungry at bedtime, eat just enough to get to sleep.

One of the side benefits of this approach is that you will sleep better. Eating three meals a day seems to cause calories to be released more evenly into the bloodstream. In turn, the even release of calories seems to improve sleep.

Taking a 30 minute walk during the day will improve your digestion and help you sleep. Try to exercise before your evening meal. Exercising too late in the day can make it hard to get to sleep.

At the time of this writing, none of the answers above attacked the real problem: You do not want to get up early. In my experience, alarm clock tricks only work for people who actually want to get up early. As long as you do not want to get up early, your body will adapt to each of these tricks until you are back where you started. Until you fix the underlying problem, you will always have trouble getting up early.

Answer 12

If you use a real alarm clock, open it up and remove the snooze button, covering up the hole so you don't stick your fingers inside or press the remaining button. The temptation to silence it instead must be resisted - probably by having the clock well away from the bed.

If you use an alarm app on your phone, replace the stock one with an app that doesn't have a snooze, or one that makes you do something significant to silence it. Here's an old list of such apps; some make you walk around before they'll shut up, others just allow you to disable the snooze.

Some people swear by "dawn alarm clocks" that increase the brightness of a lamp before sounding the alarm. The only one I have any experience of was overpriced junk -- not even reliable.

Whatever approach you take, you should regard it as training. So when your no-snooze alarm goes off, you get out of bed and get moving. Leave the room if possible perhaps a second alarm in another room (battery powered in the bathroom) would get you moving. Do not even sit on the bed (e.g. to dress) until the evening.

Answer 13

Pushing the snooze button so many times is not an addiction(what you call). It signifies how lazy and irresponsible you are. You don't need a life hack for the reason. All you need is motivation(no offence).

Drink lots of water before sleep so that you will wake up to pee. Once you get into washroom make sure you don't come back and sleep. Rather brush your teeth and finish your morning ablutions and get back to your work. This is what i do my self everyday. It helps! Time is precious make the best use of it.

Answer 14

Move the alarm clock across the room. When I physically have to get out of bed I am better about not falling back asleep.

Alternatively, feed a cat/dog/fish/velociraptor first thing in the morning. They like schedules as well, so it makes sense.

Answer 15

The method that I used to break my addition to the snooze function was to set two alarms. The first would be appropriate for the entire household to hear, such as the default phone alarm. The second alarm was set to be something very embarrassing that I did not want others to hear. This way, I would be forced to get up and disable the alarms, lest the second alarm go off and my children hear the terrible soundtrack (NSFW) that I put on the second alarm.

The OP mentions that other people live in the house, namely his grilfriend. So the linked soundtrack may or may not be appropriate, but a creative person could always find other things which should not be heard (NSFW).

Answer 16

in a comment you mentioned that your girlfriend might want to sleep in longer than you, this could be part of the problem, if she sleeps in longer she may want to stay up later and counteract you trying to get to bed on time and waking up on time, thus the snooze button.

if you get up together than it is going to be easier for both of you to get on schedule, and probably help other aspects of your life together as well.

there are a lot of things in life that are easier to accomplish when you do them with other people, this is one of those things.

another thing is that you need to be excited to get up, excited for the day. look forward to getting up in the morning. look forward to a new day.

these things will help you get out of the habit of using the snooze button, and may help you get to the point where your body wakes you after it has enough sleep without the need for the alarm clock.

Answer 17

Short circuit your sleep need by going to bed and to sleep earlier. If you're going down later and continuously shortchanging your body of sleep, then go to bed 4 hours earlier than normal.

TV won't care, the internet won't care, whatever you're doing in the evening can be done some other time if at all.

My best fix was staying off the Imgur website - because it was endless, there was no defined finish, and the clock kept slipping around. 3AM bedtime with an alarm at 7 AM simply won't work for long.

Answer 18

I'd suggest seeing a doctor to be evaluated for depression. Depression can change your sleep patterns and make it very difficult, even if fully awake, to get out of bed. It can also masquerade as sleep deprivation, or vice versa, and have other physical symptoms.

No, not really a lifehack, but there's no lifehack that will solve your problem if you're so depressed you just go back to bed no matter how hard you have to work to shut off the alarm.

Alternatively, if you're medically certain that depression isn't the cause, you might explore hypnosis. It's very commonly used to overcome bad habits.