If you are sleeping so heavily that you sleep through your alarm every time, you probably aren’t getting enough sleep. Go to bed earlier.

No sure shot but it does sound like it’s not the alarm that’s the problem. You’ve trained yourself to be able to ignore your alarm, that it doesn’t mean “get-out-of-bed” time to your unconscious brain. Change the alarm tone on your phone and have a few practice sessions. Set your new alarms after a short nap and as soon as those alarms go off throw off all the covers and stand up fully as soon as you can. The idea is to retrain your brain to get up all the way at the sound of that alarm.

Another thing that’s really helped me personally is installing a smart light bulb that turns itself on just before my sound alarms start going off. That way I’m not trying to force myself awake in a dark noisy room.

I use an old standalone alarm clock, that I put on the other side of the room. So I have to get up to turn it off.

Put your phone/alarm somewhere that makes you get up to turn it off. Then you’re already out of bed.

Go to bed earlier. If you’re frequently sleeping through your alarms or falling asleep immediately after turning them off, then you’re not getting enough sleep. Any tips and tricks like “two alarms 5 minutes apart” or “drink water before bed so you have to pee when you wake up” will only get you so far where sleep deprivation is concerned.

Turn the volume up on your alarms, and pick an annoying ring tone helps a lot. As well setting the phone away from the bed if you’re able to.

I use a smart alarm app. It uses your mic to track your breathing, and uses that information to identify when you’re in deeper and lighter phases of sleep. You set a range of time for the alarm, and when it detects you coming out of a deep cycle it starts the alarm. I’ve always slept through alarms, and this works like a dream.

There are devices that literally shake the bed to wake up a sleeper. Most often used by deaf or hard-of-hearing people for whom audio alarms are non-starters, but it could work for you if you’re actually sleeping through and not snoozing. There are a few that work on smells as well.

Be super anxious that your spouse is going to start belittling you for not getting anything done so that the moment movement anywhere in the house happens you bolt awake and start cleaning something, get a divorce, move to a new house so all the noises are different and everything sets off the “oh fuck I need to wake up and clean” response, then carry that anxiety over to assuming your super caring new roommate is going to secretly hate you unless you’re always awake and cleaning something. Worked for me anyway I can wake up hours earlier than I used to I don’t even need an alarm

Practice getting up in response to your alarm.

Seriously.

Once or twice a day, in the middle of the day, go lay down in bed, like you’re going to sleep, and set your alarm for maybe 5-10 minutes. The moment it goes off, shut it off and stand up. Teach your body the habit of standing up, immediately, in response to the alarm. So long as you’re getting enough sleep, you’ll start doing it in the morning, on reflex.

Does this occur even after a few nights of proper sleep?

If you generally sleep enough and don’t have other sleeping problems you could try to change the ringtone. Or if you are like me and turn off the alarm half a sleep and don’t remember it, put your alarms further away from your bed.

Well, it mostly depends on why you’re missing them.

Believe it or not, sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Some people will sleep through any noises at all, though it’s really unusual.

Most likely, your brain is telling you that you aren’t sleeping enough by refusing to react to the stimulus.

So you gotta fix what’s wrong. If you’re staying up late, begin rest earlier, even if you don’t sleep earlier (which can be the case for some types of insomnia). Just being in dark/low light with as little external stimulus as possible can help your brain and body “recharge” a little even when you don’t sleep enough. That’s a short term fix, you’ll eventually need to figure out what to do to address the insomnia directly.

If you’re not staying asleep it’s harder to address without outside help. Tbh, it isn’t usually something that you can crowd source an answer for just because there’s too many possibilities. A sleep study tends to end up being the real answer. But you can try various meditative methods when you wake up to help drop back out faster, if you’re waking up enough to do so.

The major problem comes in when you can’t tell you’re waking up, or are just sleeping so poorly that it amounts to the same thing. Apnea is a bitch like that, so you’d want to rule it out one way or another.

All of that being said, you can also try vibration based alarms, like the kind that go under the mattress or pillow. There’s also wrist and headband based ones. Sometimes, especially if your brain is just inviting the alarms because it’s pissy about ignoring sounds, tactile stimulation gets the job done because our brains process it differently, and it’s harder to filter out past a point.

I would try getting more and better sleep as the primary fix though. Get to bed earlier, make sure you minimize light and noise, and learn some techniques like progressive relaxation and deep, controlled breathing. If you need background sound, err on the side of “white noise” over music, but music will do in a pinch as long as it’s on a timer so it doesn’t interfere with the sound of the alarm later.

Make sure you aren’t snoring heavy, and if you are, address that. The problem is that it often takes a ton of experimentation to figure out what actually helps you. Snoring isn’t the same as apnea, necessarily, but it does disturb your sleep sometimes.

Avoid stimulants at least 4 hours before bed. No caffeine, no tobacco, no meth (the last is mostly a joke, but check that any prescription meds or OTC meds aren’t stimulants).

And, obviously, if you can, talk to your doctor about a sleep study.

There is an app called Sleep As Android that I used to use. You put your phone on your bed next to you and it tries to determine what level of sleep you’re in. You tell it when you’d like to get up and if it detects that you’re in a lighter stage of sleep within a certain amount of time before that, it triggers the alarm. You’re then more likely to hear it, and more likely to feel rested, than if it went off like, twenty minutes later.

Also played nice with WearOS watches.

I’m really sensitive to light when I sleep. I’ve got blackout curtains, no annoying little lights on any devices, the usual. One of the advantages is that by having a smart light bulb set to gradually turn on alongside my alarm, it really wakes me the hell up. Maybe try incorporating a light to yours?

I use an app called AMDroid, it makes me do math in my head before I can shut it off. Works every time.