A week before Christmas I asked my wife to buy me a new alarm clock and with a bewildering look on her face, a kind of ‘what a wasted gift on you’ look, she obliged and bought me an alarm clock that uses light instead of noise to awaken me from my slumber.
I unboxed it on the evening of January 1st, ready for the first of many early morning rises, with a slight excitement that I wouldn’t be woken by the worst noise on the planet … the default iPhone alarm ring.
So with 7:00am set on the alarm clock, I rested my weary eyes.
And when I woke up at 8.54am on January 2nd, I sent it back to Amazon and my wife got her £34.99 refund.
Keen not to give in after the very first morning, I turned in desperation to the app store to find a quick and dirty answer.
And to my surprise there was an app with a 5 star rating from more than 15,000 reviews called Alarmy that had a simple 3 step solution to waking up.
Set the alarm
Alarm goes off
Turn alarm off by completing missions
Feeling inquisitive about what types of missions and how they can help me get out of bed and if it was just another gimmick, I downloaded the Alarmy app.
In Alarmy, there are 8 different missions you can set that you *must* complete for the alarm to turn off.
Squat
Type
Steps
Shake
Photo
Math
QR/Barcode
Memory
All 8 mission types are available with a paid subscription (£7.49 per month) and 4 missions are available with the free version - Squat, Typing, Step, Photo.
Now when I say that you must complete a mission to turn the alarm off, YOU MUST complete a mission to turn the alarm off.
Quite literally the alarm does not stop and it is deafening. This alarm is so loud, and it gets louder the longer it goes off.
You can even try and turn your phone off but when you turn it back on the alarm will start going off again!
When choosing my mission, I had to take into account a big factor. My wife, who is not opposed to driving her elbow into my back when my alarm has been going off too long.
Squats I thought would take too long. Plus I’d more than likely pull a hamstring on the 2nd squat and then the alarm would be going off forever.
Typing was out the window pretty quickly. I can type with my eyes closed and I could do that without leaving the warmth of my bed.
Steps was a contender, but the built-in iPhone pedometer is suspect. But more than that, I’d be walking about the house with the alarm still ringing.
I needed a mission that would get me out of bed immediately but the alarm would also turn off quite quickly.
Shaking my phone didn’t suit for the same reasons as the typing mission and the memory mission would’ve been a nightmare. I have a bad memory during the day after 3 cups of coffee, imagine forgetting to remember the puzzle and the alarm keeps going off. Again, I’d expect a quick elbow in the spine.
Math could be done from the bed and so would defeat the purpose. My biggest obstacle is actually getting out of bed, not necessarily waking up.
So I’m left with two missions; Photo and QR/barcode.
I was set on the barcode scan mission and chose my shower gel as the barcode I would need to scan before the alarm stops. I’d have to get out of bed and into the bathroom to scan the shower gel, and while I'm there I might as well just get in the shower.
But there are two flaws with this mission (for me).
I’m going to forget and throw away my shower gel when it’s empty and then NEVER be able to turn the alarm off.
I could probably do that with the bathroom light off.
And so here I am left with the Photo mission. I chose my sink in the bathroom as the photo I would need to take to stop the deafening ring.
This works for a few reasons, the main one being that it gets me out of bed immediately. The second is that I have to turn the light on and blind myself, bringing melatonin levels (sleepy chemical) down to zero. Three, it involves a little bit of concentration and crucially my sink isn’t going anywhere.
With the Photo mission, you take the original picture and when your alarm goes off you first hit ‘Dismiss’ and you have approximately 10 seconds to take the photo of the sink before it goes off again.
But you also have to line up the hologram of the original photo with the new photo. It doesn’t have to be exact but it has to be bloody close for the alarm to accept your photo.
In the space of 60 seconds, the alarm is off, the bathroom light is on and the brain is engaged somewhat.
It happens so fast and there’s an almost ‘how did I get here’ feeling. But I did get there and I wasn’t still in bed.
The Alarmy app has a bunch of cool features including multiple missions for every alarm, wake up checks and a bunch of sounds like rainfall to help you sleep, which to be honest, isn’t for me.
But this app has been awesome. I’ve used it every day since January 3rd including Saturdays and Sundays, keeping my alarm time constant at 7am and my results have been great.
I’m up within 60 seconds fearing an elbow assault, I didn’t hit snooze once and I’m using the app consistently.
Every morning it gets a little easier and I’m now starting to wake up a few minutes before the 7am alarm, funny how we can manipulate our body clock like that.
Now to some, 7am isn’t early at all and not much of an achievement, to me it’s 2 hours before my usual work-from-home wake up time and a great starting point.
Now you might be wondering why I've kept the alarm set at 7am on weekends…
The success of becoming a morning person will be making it a habit and eventually rendering this an unconscious play.
I want to get in the repetitions to build up momentum and I don’t want to put my body clock out of whack by getting up later on the weekends and then feeling like death on Monday morning. I’m aiming for consistency.
It’s the 28th of January as I write this and so I’ve kept this routine for 25 mornings.
I am conscious of the fact that I stopped drinking alcohol this month for my annual attempt at Dry January and so waking up at 7am on a Sunday morning hasn’t been conflicting with a raging hangover and poor sleep quality.
And it’ll be interesting to see how this habit manifests itself in February as I have family parties and night outs with friends every weekend.
But for now, with one twelfth of the year complete, I’m going to bank this progress.
To come back to the app, Alarmy has been an incredible aide. I’d advise anyone else on this journey to download it and give it a try. Use the free trial of the pro version to see if it’s worth the money, but for me the free version is good enough.
Let me know how you find it - all replies go to my personal inbox.