I have been waking up to peaceful sounds and songs since early aughts and never looked back. Just reading this brings shivers - being jarred awake with those noises is juuuust not for me.

wait - yours makes a noise?

100%. Gentle increment is the one. Obnoxious loud noises first thing just put me in a bad mood.

how do/did you deal with the fear that you'd just sleep through the alarm?

This is what got me past using alarms. Wake up before the alarm enough times and you just stop setting them.

well, I don't just immediately wake up to sound, it's sort of gradual.
I can tell how long it's been going on by where it's at but not waking is not an issue.

Idk what the iPhone one in particular sounds like, but after growing to hate alarm sounds (and sleeping through a few less obnoxious ones) I ended up moving to a system that turns the lights on automatically at a certain time (at a lower brightness). That seems a bit less unpleasant even if getting woken up is never fun

Try Android lol

I have no idea how I manage to wake up 1 to 20 minutes before my alarm sometimes.

What do you mean I woke up at 05:59? Have I been counting without knowing it??

The weird thing is that if I don't set the alarm, I'll wake up 30 or so minutes after it would've went off... So I usually set alarms and stop them before they go off.

And hear I use an air raid/tornado siren as my alarm noise

I'm a huge fan of lights that simulate the sunrise. They make me wake up fully and comfortably. The absolute perfect way to start my day. Unfortunately it works equally well on my wife who goes to bed and wakes up several hours after I do and hates that thing. Eventually I'm likely to win on this fight, but until I'm too deaf for alarms or she and I have to wake up at the same time, I suck it up and accept that I love her more than a comfortable start to my day.

Peaceful sounds unfortunately don't wake me

can you not change the alarm sound on an iPhone?

Put Painkiller by Judas as the third song.

You could always have a proper alarm a few minutes later as a fallback...

that's a really good idea. a gentle wake alarm, followed by a "FUCKING WAKE UP" alarm; that way you can try to wake peacefully and if that fails get jolted awake.

fat lot of that does me now that I've had a child, but I wondered how that could have worked.

Why would you want your alarm to be less effective?

Reminds me of this funny video exaggerating the difference between default Android and iPhone alarms:

https://youtube.com/shorts/sghQICCnssc

As do I! Although as a siren enthusiast I'm completely desensitized to the sound and have slept through it before lmao. I own a functional 3D printed 1/3 scale model of the siren I use for my alarm, maybe I should use that instead? xD

It probably wasn't intentional, but back when I had an actual physical alarm clock it made this electronic-buzz-static sort of sound just before the actual alarm started beeping. I got pretty good at hitting the snooze before the alarm went off

My brother used Sold Me by Seether while we were growing up. He hooked it up to a stereo and would try to get up and turn it off before the heavy guitars kick in and wake up the whole house. That's only 8 seconds. It never really worked and of course I had to share the room with him

My smartwatch's vibration alarm goes off five minutes before my phone does, usually it's enough to wake me and I disable the phone's alarm (if it's close to the alarm time I have the option to bypass it for today)

Don't want to start my day off with anger at an annoying sound. Waking up me might just dismiss that instead of snoozing it in annoyance.

I made my alarm a lullaby to calm myself down.

Yeah, you can. I don’t understand this post.

Yeah, I had to set my alarm to force me to scan a QR code on my coffee maker to snooze, because barely awake me got too good at solving math problems. There's no way I'd be waking up if the music was pleasant.

Mine does a whirring noise from starting up the CD player so that seems to work (the CD is peaceful lullaby music, the alarm is the CD cranked up to 13)

My alarm is, "song that plays when you encounter a coelacanth."

Default Doe always annoys me. You don't have to stay with the default and have the Brand tell you how to live.

Are you using Sleep as Android? I ended up getting that app for the CAPTCHA functionality and it definitely helped (I use the Zombie Walk setting)

Isn't it amazing that a human can be conditioned to respond behaviorally to a stimulus that requires precision tracking of time and also this occurs while sleeping. ?

I mean think about it.

You wake up 5 min before the alarm goes off. Consistently.

Your brain kept track of the time the whole time you were sleeping. And was able to wake you up at the right moment with a specific thought "turn off the alarm".

Honestly, conditioning theory is fascinating.

Yes. You have a circadian clock. It's a clock in your body and it's pretty accurate. It's why you get hungry around the same time every day.

The experience of regularly waking up right before an unpleasant sound would occur is from operant conditioning.

I used to live by a railroad track in the city. So all night at specific times, freight trains ran through , blasting their horns. After a month I would wake up about 5-10 min multiple times a night, right before the trains. So I could cover my head and ears.
I still mostly remember the schedule. The worst one was the 645. I had to get up at 730 for work. So this one of often woke me up and then I couldn't go back to sleep, making my day start as shitty as possible.

The decibels was nearly 80 in my apartment. Which was close to as if a lawnmower was running in my room. Insanely loud.

So the aversion/punishment part of the conditioning worked well to train me to wake up and cover my head with a pillow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_clock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning

yeah but my brain is a bitch too, and sometimes i wake up, turn off the alarm, and then go back to sleep fully believing my alarm will wake me up

People at work have heard my alarm tone and think its hilarious that as a middle aged man my alarm tone is so flowery and gentle until I explained that being awoken suddenly by a harsh abrasive noise puts me in a very combative and abrasive mood for the next several hours and I come to work 45 minutes after it goes off...

I'm using AMDroid because I used to use an NFC chip and it had that capability. It has very robust options for making it difficult to turn off, and can even ramp up the difficulty with each snooze.

All "good" alarms are like this for me. I hate them to much my body itself will wake me up a minute before it goes off.

Back in the alarm days of college I used Pink Floyd - Time because the couple seconds of ticking before everything went off would send me into conniptions to prevent the calamity.

Then I found sleepyti.me and now I only use 'em when I can't/haven't gone to bed at the right time or really can't risk missing a plane. Would recommend.