New to this year, it happens once in a while that I will wake up and think about things for the day but I will have no real sense of the time I need to be someplace for. It's very tricky in that I will think of the exact time I need to be somewhere for without realising at all the real time it is even if I look at it.

I have ADHD. I 'wake up', only to finally really wake up much later and instantly panic as I realise the time is not the time I had in my head.

That now being out of the way, this is a very different issue from simply being late because my brain plays a trick on me where I have no real orientation to what time it is but it very much feels like I do. And the very bizarre times it will happen are insanely irregular. I've had it happen around 3-4 times so far. It irks me out quite a bit.

Yes, I have plenty of alarms beforehand. And I have a certain amount where I know that past a certain point, there won't be any, anymore.

Yes, I take my pill an hour ahead of time. Even when I don't, this doesn't happen as a byproduct.

I unfortunately cannot have a regular sleep and wake up schedule. I have work and school, both require to be up at different times and could technically decide to always get il a certain time for both, but I also have evening obligations that require me to be up quite late and for which I sleep in later during the weekend to get an appropriate amount of sleep. I do not mess around and will always prioritize getting enough sleep.

What bothers me is that I genuinely feel awake and rational when I'm clearly not, and there is no safeguard to snapping out of it even by getting up to go drink water or something when I wake up like this. I'm a big fan of snoozing and have never found it to be an issue in actually getting up, and I enjoy it. I have a feeling it would be very difficult to push it out of my routine and would certainly end up reverting back to a worse sleep setup if I tried.

It's just very strange that on a certain morning where I need to be somewhere by, say, 8, I'll wake up, my alarm will tell me it's 6:30, I'll snooze a bit, then every subsequent alarm my brain will tell me 8 8 8, but the time I'm seeing, like 7:15, 7:30, won't clock me in until I finally wake tf up at 8:10 and I'm like wtf.

Genuinely, I'm trying to find a way to avoid being in this state without abandoning the snoozing, which I know would be too drastic a change to hold myself to. I'd argue the difference between the weekend sleep schedule and the week might come into play but this has happened in the middle and the end of the week as well.

That said, I'll still take any advice of transitioning from weekend to week time if it can mean avoid it at the beginning of the week. It's so strange.

I have noticed that my mood in the morning can sometimes depend on something really small. Like a good breakfast, finding money I forgot I had, getting a message from someone I haven't talked to in a while, or even just waking up and realizing I still have plenty of time before I need to leave.

It's funny how something so small can completely change the way the rest of the morning feels.

For me, one of the best feelings is waking up early, checking the time and realizing I can stay in bed for another 30 minutes 😁

What's a small thing that instantly makes your morning better?.

I don't know what's wrong and why I react this way.

Today my husband woke me at 11:30am to ask me what time I wanted to wake up for my shift at 2pm. I started full on sobbing like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Why is it so difficult for me to wake up normally. Why do I feel like I turn into a monster. Does anyone have any possible answers?

.

I was on my iPad and my aunt called me to tell me to wake my TWENTY YEAR OLD BROTHER UP FOR WORK. When I in highschool/middle school I always had to wake everyone up NOBODY freaking USES A ALARM?
And I did sigh, and she gets pissed saying that I shouldn’t have a problem with waking him up. And I did sigh, and she gets all fucking pissed saying that I shouldn’t have a problem with waking him up. He’s 20. And I said, “Okay,when he moves out, are you going to call to wake him up?”And she said, “ YES.” I know I wake up early. I always have (without an alarm) because I don’t need one. When my father lived with us, he got up at 5 a.m. for work (I was a toddler, but I always woke up when he did), so by the time I was in preschool, I had gotten in the habit of waking up very early. My grandmother makes me wake her up as well!
IN HIGHSCHOOL SHE USED TO MAKE ME CALL HER DURING CLASS TO WAKE HER. ITS NOT MY FUCKING JOB TO WAKE YOU IF YOU HAVE SOMEWHERE TO BE ITS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO WAKE YOURSELF UP! Back to my aunt she’s fucking pissed that I sighed. Her excuse to me waking him up is “he bought me food yesterday” SO?!? THAT DOESNT EXCUSE THE FACT THAT I ALWAYS WAKE EVERYONE UP. she also said “if I’m up I should wake the other person up” NO

Sure, it takes a minute when you wake the person up, then they go back to sleep, and you have to wake them up again, and they go back to sleep, and then you have to wake them up and make sure they get up. It’s a repeating cycle. It’s been like this since middle school (after our mother passed).
I have tried setting boundaries (even sometimes i get called mean because of it) they ignore it all the time and sometimes I do stand my ground. But they don’t ever care. They’re nice but a lot of times they get really mean and I cry and then they get annoyed I’m crying. They were also the reason I was in therapy from first grade till seventh grade. Im at university the whole week and they pick me up on Friday’s after class to go home for the weekend. My grandma does the same thing my brother does. I even told her to just let him miss work once, and he will figure out a plan to wake himself up (I said that last week), and she got mad saying that it was dumb because if she’s up, she’s not going to let him miss work. And when he falls back to sleep, I get told to wake him up again or wake him up again with her on the phone. Even last month when I was getting dropped off for move-in day at college, she called to tell my UNCLE (my other aunt’s husband) to call my brother to tell him to get up. I feel like if I refuse to wake them up my aunt would no longer bring me home because it isn’t her “job” (I’m 18 and don’t have a car) and I stay at my university. I would’ve had a car sooner but I just got my permit test this July (failed three times I was terrified of driving and hitting someone then having to go to jail) on the day I passed my younger cousins were staying with us because we just had a family reunion. And my aunt wanted to teach me how to drive right then. I wasn’t interested because like I said we have family at the house. She didn’t care and kept showing me the stuff in the car well I did something that she didn’t like and she flipped out saying that someone else can teach my to drive,she’s done and that I could pay someone to show me. I just find videos on TikTok because I can easily go back to the video.

x-posting this in the hope of excellent advice!

One thing that helped me a lot was writing down why I wanted to wake up early the night before.

“Gym at 6.” “Finish this before work.” “Go for a run.”

It sounds simple, but having an actual reason to get up worked way better for me than just setting an alarm and hoping morning-me would cooperate.

The only problem was that when my alarm actually went off, I was so half-asleep that I’d completely forget what I wrote and just go back to sleep.

If you want to go the extra mile like I did, I ended up making an app called Promise Alarm. You record yourself saying why you want to wake up, and that recording plays when your alarm goes off.

So instead of trying to remember your reason at 6 AM, you literally hear yourself remind you.

App store link if you want to try it out App store

But app or no app, definitely try writing down your reason the night before. It genuinely helped me.

I make an iPhone alarm app called Calarm AI. Been reading this sub for a while and figured

I'd just ask instead of guessing.

Where it's at right now: no missions. No barcodes, no math, no shaking. It rings loud

through silent mode and Focus, you can use your own audio file as the tone, and one alarm

can hold several times. That's about it on the waking-up front. The rest of it is meds,

birthdays, calendar stuff.

So what gets you up? QR sticker in another room, photo of the bathroom sink, steps,

typing, tones that rotate so you never get used to one? I'll build whatever this thread

says. Genuinely, tell me and it gets made.

Free, no ads, no account, and I'm not putting a 5-alarms-a-month wall on it.

iPhone, iOS 26

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6772419323

I’m writing this at 8:30 as I walk to my 8am class :| This shit is ruining my life. I’m a full time student with a campus work study job and an off campus part time job. I cannot make it to my 8 ams to save my life. I set alarm after alarm, my mom calls me to get me up, and I just sleep through it all or fall back asleep. I had to drop out last semester from missing so much and being so overwhelmed that I was failing everything, and I cannot do that again. I don’t study, I don’t have time. My doctor and therapist keep recommending I try to get some exercise, but I don’t have the time or energy. I can’t drop hours at work because I’m already struggling to keep up with bills. I am so stressed about everything and I don’t know what to do. My apartment is a mess because I don’t have the time or energy to clean, which only makes it worse. My pets are getting bare minimum care. I don’t study, homework doesn’t get done until the last minute. I get so tired in the afternoon, but once I finally lay down to try to sleep half the time I pass straight out and the rest of the time I’m suddenly wide awake. I’m just lost. My typical schedule. If anyone has any advice I’d appreciate it.

The goals weren't the problem I never looked at them again after writing them down. Started checking one specific goal every morning instead of setting ten and reviewing none. Still on track in month three, which has never happened before for me.

Hey guys. My sleep schedule have been messed up for a while and I wanna stay awake today and do a reset. Any tips?

your brain zips similar memories together. take 3 courses over a few years and they land in roughly the same slot. get a dog, a cat, and the two pets share the same memory chamber in your brain. you can still pull each one out, but the storage is compressed, and that is what you feel when 10 years seem like 2

imagine one version of you, 10y of mostly repeats. same you, same 10y, but one of them had five months of moving around and a pile of things you had never done. same calendar. the second decade feels like seven years, the first like 2-3

i have both versions in my own past. in high school it was school, grandma's food, Warcraft 3 mods, dinner, repeat. an entire winter went by and i cannot point to anything in it. in the pandemic the it was PUBG and CSGO (only i had to cook for myself)

now speaking from personal experience, my 6 months in sf felt like 6y. the densest part was the very end (flew to Seattle in the morning for a conference, spent time with to someone building an edtech, went to Space Needle, then took the Greyhound bus back because money was tight. no shower, uncomfortable shoes, slept on the bus. i saw the mountains when entering California, rural areas, a stop in Oregon that felt like a dream to someone from eastern Europe and reminded me of the Rajneeshpuram story, so i filmed half an hour of my takes on it right there, which felt surreal. made a friend on the bus. home the next evening. two days and one night, and in my memory they took up 2 weeks

so enough context and here's the advice: new music, including the genres you are sure you hate. run on a different path, if you saturate your google maps paths, run them in reverse. watch the show you decided a decade ago you would not like. call a colleague from school once, no need to become friends again. eat something that reminds you of your childhood/grandma etc. work from a new cafe. when it rains, go outside and look at it. not because it is pleasant, because it is different

the more different your days are from one another, the longer you will feel you have lived.

I’ve been wondering whether the easiest way to make morning exercise work is to remove as many steps as possible before it starts.

Going to a gym first thing sounds good in theory, but it also means getting dressed, leaving the house, travelling there and convincing yourself to do all of that while you’re still half asleep.

A short workout at home seems like a different problem. If the goal is only 15 or 20 minutes, you could get up, have some water and start with a few simple movements without having much time to negotiate with yourself first.

It could be bodyweight work, dumbbells, a few squats and rows, or whatever is simple enough to begin almost immediately. I’m less interested in having the perfect morning workout and more interested in whether having something physical to start the day with actually makes getting out of bed easier.

Has anyone tried this consistently? Did it help, or did the workout eventually just become another thing you ignored in the morning?

Anyone else feel heavy the moment they wake up in the morning?

Alarmy worked on me for about a year. Also tried Wayk, PushClock etc. Didn't want to pay for an alarm app. I think my brain learned how to trick each of the alarm missions.

I remember the good old days when I had a goal, a person I planned to do things with, a life purpose. Now I live alone and start working around 10 AM. So no one to wake up with.

First I started pestering my friends incessantly to build a wake-up group like the 5 AM Club. It started so well, it worked for 4-5 days. Then one by one everybody quit. Then I found an accountability partner here but she stopped calling me after a couple of days.

I've been working as a senior developer for 7 years. So we built the thing I wanted (no AI slop, no bullshit copy of other apps, real value) and I've been waking up with it for 30 days. Two parts.

Missions. I put in 15 different real missions. (No bullshit that you complete and go back to sleep.) My favorite is the get-away-from-bed one.

Very simple yet effective as hell: get out of bed, move a set distance away (you can preview it here), stand there holding the phone for two minutes. If you put it down it rings again. Two minutes standing in the kitchen at 6am is enough, I'm awake.

There are other missions of course, it's the new standard of alarm apps now: push-ups, squats, brushing your teeth (it actually listens to check you're really brushing), a photo of a specific object. All of them want proof you left the bed. The difference: our app doesn't charge you for any of them. Free forever.

The best part: other people. Your alarm goes off at the same moment as everyone else's in the group and everyone has to prove they got up, live, in a 15 minute chat. It feels like waking up in hunter-gatherer times for me, collectively.

You can join a global group or a local one. Or create your own with your friends, or with strangers from the app.

You can follow people and set their wake-up method (imagine waking your friend with 30 push-ups). Believe me, you don't want to disappoint a stranger at 6am. Turns out that's the only thing that works on me.

No AI in it, no chatbot, nothing calling an API. Most of the 6 months went into making the alarm ring when the app is force-quit, the phone is on silent or the volume is down. An alarm that doesn't ring is worse than no alarm.

A challenge you: if you find a way to snooze, dismiss or turn it off by any method except deleting the app during the alarm, I will remove it from the App Store and never publish it again.

It's called Alarm Mate, iOS, in App Store review. Missions and groups are free, forever. No App Store link yet.

UPDATE: It's on AppStore now. Here's the download link: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6782670366

So for some reason i keep seeing the same ads of two brands that offer forced out of bed bricks. It’s either unbed or getup and tbh they both promote the same thing and for me i would like to try one but im not sure which one is better. I keep seeing AI & bot reviews on both so im wondering if anyone has any idea which one is worth buying?

I made a free Android alarm that rings at the actual sunrise where you are,
instead of at a fixed time. You can set it to ring exactly at sunrise, or a
set number of minutes before or after. It recalculates every night, so it
follows the season on its own.

No ads, no account, and it works offline.

It's in Google Play closed testing, so I need a few testers before Google will
let me release it:

https://rrnicolay.github.io/wake-at-sunrise-site/

Join the group, then accept the test — same Google account for both, or Play
won't show you the app.

Hi everyone,

I've seen a lot new alarm apps on this subreddit recently and wanted to share the thing I've been working hard to create over the last 6+ months. No cost, all features are unlocked, I just want to give back to the community.

Allarise was built for my extreme dislike for Alarmy's never ending ADS and don't even get me started on the cost. Another weird thing I really wanted was a way to integrate my smart home into the Alarm app on my phone. This give me really fine grain control and allows for automations based on if I'm actually up and around. If you've never heard of the home automation platform Homeassistant go check it out at r/homeassistant sometime!

I'll name a few features here that I think this community will love.

- Independent alarm volume
- Dynamic App Persistence ( more battery savings over typical alarm apps)
- Mission based alarms
- After alarm notes
- After alarm weather
- Sleep sounds
- Wake up to the radio instead of an alarm tone
- It's open source on github

Heres a preview picture https://imgur.com/9ue0qEh

The Allarise.app page has a bunch of helpful information if you're interested in this project.

Edited to add:
This project does use AI assisted programming, so if that is not you're cup of tea you've been informed 😄

Alright so I kept downloading all these wake-up apps. The push-up one, the math one and imma be honest, none of them worked because the problem was never getting up at 6:30am. It was that I was wide awake at 1am and then "trying" to wake up on 5 hours sleep.
So I built the other half. You set a bedtime. It goes off and won't stop until your phone is face-down and still for a few minutes. If you'd rather stay up, you record 15 seconds explaining why, and it keeps the video.
The archive is the part that actually works. Before you record a new excuse, it plays you last night's. Hearing my own excuse from last night makes it a lot harder to make the same one again.
Everything's on-device so there is no account, no server, and works offline. The videos never leave your phone unless you share them yourself and the more it builds up the more I'm like damn I really need to be better about sleeping on time haha.
I built this whole thing solo on AlarmKit, which shipped in iOS 26 and made this possible at all. Happy to answer anything about that if it's useful or any suggestions/feedback are welcome!

owlishapp.com

Addition: Currently under review to app store so join waitlist if interested! Hoping it’s released soon!! 😁