How Using a Barcode Alarm Improved my Morning Routine

To many, mornings are the most important time of day. What you do in the morning might set the mood for the rest of the day, and a lot of people find themselves to be the most productive during mornings. However, mornings can also be hard and unpleasant for many–including me. Because of work, I have to get up and out of bed at a strict time, but even on weekends, I end up staying in bed far past the initial alarm (or alarms).

The reality of work or school starting at a set time, typically early in the morning, is unfortunately a fact of life for many of us. This can sometimes become a hindrance to achieving the optimal amount of sleep. For some others, it could directly be misaligned to our natural chronotype or circadian rhythm. To address the punctuality that work demands, we turn to alarms, a tool now heavily associated with waking up in today’s day and age.

Alarms can be either helpful to us or a necessary evil. And while there’s plenty of discussion around the benefits of naturally waking up to the sun over setting an alarm, I believe alarms still have a place in the discussion. Many rely on alarms to arrive to work on time, or to avoid oversleeping. In addition, I don’t think there should be any shame in using tools to help as long as they are right for you. You are not necessarily “lazy” or “undisciplined” for needing an alarm to help you get out of bed in the mornings, and that sentiment also undercuts the struggles of those with depression, executive dysfunction, and other symptoms directly impacting one’s ability to perform certain actions on demand. While, as a neurotypical person, I do not have to deal with the same sort of struggles, blanket statements like the above only serve to bring down both neurotypical and neurodivergent people alike.

And just as any tool in one’s arsenal, alarms also come in a multitude of forms that can suit an individual’s unique needs. From sunrise alarms, traditional alarm clocks, alarm apps and challenge alarms, there are plenty to choose from. In particular, I will be exploring one of these types, the challenge or barcode alarm, that has helped me tremendously in regulating my own routines and starting my mornings right.

What are Challenge Alarms?

Challenge alarms are alarm apps where an action is required in order to dismiss the alarm sound. Some examples include taking a specific picture, solving math problems, moving to a bright area, scanning a barcode, or shaking the phone a set amount of times. These are designed to “wake you up” more than a simple press of the dismiss button, since it requires physical movement or for you to use your brain a little. Out of these, the barcode alarm has many advantages above the rest:

1. It is versatile. Barcodes can be generated, printed, and placed wherever you want. This is especially helpful if you want to establish routines, and have the barcode “guide” you into it.
2. It requires you to get up. Often, I find that I am less likely to crawl back into bed when I’m already out of it, especially if I set up the barcode in the bathroom.
3. It is more reliable than photo-based challenges. This might be from personal experience, but while it’s hard to get a barcode wrong, you can get a photo wrong if certain aspects of it have changed since you first set it, you’re focusing on the wrong area, etc.

My experiments with barcode alarms started during my university years, and since then I have tweaked it to my liking. My current setup is two in the morning: one in the bathroom to get me to brush my teeth, and one downstairs next to my yoga mat, to encourage myself to do a light workout in the morning.

There are many barcode apps on the marketplace. I’m an Android user, so I don’t have any personal experience with what’s on the iOS App Store, but for Android, my favourite is one called AMDroid. AMDroid, while missing a few types of challenges you can find in other similar apps, is extremely versatile, customizable, and covers about every edge case I could imagine when setting up a morning alarm that will prevent me from ignoring it. Tend to go back to bed after dismissing the alarm? Post-alarm confirmations set you up with a new alarm if you don’t dismiss it after a set amount of time. Find yourself editing or skipping an alarm? Protect against editing by adding a challenge before you can edit or skip. Don’t want alarms to wake you up on vacation? Set up “off days” where alarms will not sound. It’s really amazing once you dig into the features.

Example: AMDroid Profile Setup

AMDroid is structured around profiles, which are a set of settings then applied on alarms individually. To give an example on what it can do, here’s my implementation of my morning profile:

1. Snooze: I have snooze turned off for my morning alarm. I find that having the option to snooze means I always take it. REM sleep, or “rapid eye movement”, is the final stage of sleep where sleep is the deepest. Some studies have indicated that snoozing may have adverse health effects if you fall back asleep again, as you may be thrust back into REM sleep, then pulled back out again at the next alarm, which can be extremely disruptive¹. If you do choose to snooze, AMDroid allows you to set a duration, number of snoozes allowed, and to increase the volume upon each subsequent snooze taken.
2. Pre-Alarm: This is an alarm that fires before your actual alarm. I have this option turned on, set to 10 minutes before my main alarm, and at a gentle volume that slowly fades in. I’ve set this alarm this way so I’m not jolted awake from a deep sleep state, which can cause spikes to your blood pressure.
3. Post-Alarm: A notification that appears after a few minutes that you have to dismiss. If you are late to dismissing the notification, your main alarm starts again, and you go through the same process once more. I’ve set this to pop up after 15 minutes of dismissing my main alarm, and it’s been helpful on the off chance I go back to bed and sleep some more.
4. Main Alarm & Challenge: Finally, I have the challenge set up to scan a barcode in the washroom (a lot of bottles have barcodes!) In addition, I have vibration turned on so that the alarm is just a bit more annoying to me, without being too noisy to others.

An Aside on Sleep Cycles and Alarms

Sleep occurs in four cycles, beginning with light sleep and going deeper and deeper until the final, fourth stage, which is REM sleep. Once REM sleep ends, you typically cycle back to stage 2. These cycles are typically 90 minutes long³.

To help you wake up at the tail end of a REM cycle rather than in the middle of one, set your alarm based on your recommended duration of sleep, and account for REM sleep cycles. The National Sleep Foundation panel recommends teens to sleep 8-10 hours, adults to sleep 7-9 hours, and older adults to sleep 7-8 hours². Planning your alarm around REM cycles, combined with the recommended duration, can help you feel refreshed when you wake up. Calculators such as those at Sleepopolis are some examples of tools that take account of both these factors.

Here’s an example of using the Sleepopolis calculator. If you want to wake up at 7:00AM, the calculator will indicate that for six cycles of sleep, each at 90 minutes long (for a total of nine hours of sleep), you would have to fall asleep at 10:00PM. This does not include the time it takes to fall asleep, which–on average–is 14 minutes long, meaning you would have to go to bed at 9:46PM for a 9-hour duration of sleep and a wake-up time at 7:00AM.

Getting Started with Challenge Alarm Apps

Now that you’ve learned about barcode alarm apps, here’s a list of apps that might just find itself a home in your morning routine. (Note: I have asterisked apps that I have not used myself, which includes iOS apps due to being an Android user):

1. AMDroid (Android)
2. Alarmy (Android, iOS)
3. Sleep as Android (Android)
4. Challenges Alarm Clock (Android, iOS)*
5. Alarm Clock for Me (Android, iOS)*

Set it up, head to bed, and get ready for a great morning 🌞

Sources & Further Readings

References

These sources were used in this article:

1. Amerisleep. The Negative Impact of Hitting the Snooze Button. https://amerisleep.com/blog/negative-impact-snooze-button/
2. Hirshkowitz, M. et al. (2015). National Sleep Foundation’s updated sleep duration recommendations: final report. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29073398
3. Cherry, K (2023). The 4 Stages of Sleep. https://www.verywellhealth.com/the-four-stages-of-sleep-2795920

Resources

These are some further readings or resources I did not use in the article. Note that this section may sometimes contain information that may seem contradictory at first; it is meant to encourage discussion and provoke thought. (Example: While there have been studies that show the adverse effects of snoozing, some of these studies have potential bias, and not enough studies have been done in the area.)

1. Huberman Lab Podcast. Huberman Lab Toolkit for Sleep. https://hubermanlab.com/toolkit-for-sleep/
2. Sleepopolis. SleepyTime Calculator. https://sleepopolis.com/calculators/sleep/3
3. Zalani, L. (2023). Why I ditched my morning alarm clock. https://zapier.com/blog/no-alarm-clock/
4. Cleveland Clinic. Is Hitting Snooze Bad for Your Health? https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-hitting-snooze-once-er-maybe-three-times-bad-for-your-health/
5. Chaput et. al. (2015). Sleep timing, consistency, and health. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33054339/
6. Payton, L. (2022). The majority of America is hitting the snooze button. Here’s why that’s not such a bad thing after all. https://fortune.com/well/2022/11/14/benefits-of-hitting-the-snooze-button/

Media:

1. Photo by Amanda Jones on Unsplash