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How to Stop Snoozing for Good

August 27, 2026 · Ryan Ashbaugh · 7 min read

If you’re anything like me, you hit snooze every morning, multiple times, for years, maybe even decades. I can’t count how many times I thought “I’m going to quit snoozing today”, or “this week”, or “this month”. A few times I actually did, for a little while. A few weeks here or a month there where I was able to get up to my first alarm. However it never stuck, I was never able to create a real, long-lasting habit of waking up on time to replace my snoozing habit.

That’s what snoozing is really, a habit. One that we’ve reinforced over and over again each time we sleep through our alarm. However, habits can be broken, and I’m glad to say I finally broke my snoozing habit this year. It wasn’t easy, but it can be done, and I’m sharing here the full guide to how I was able to stop snoozing for good.

When our alarms go off, snoozing is the easy choice, so it’s no mystery why so many of us choose it by default. Perhaps we didn’t get enough sleep, or we’re halfway through a sleep cycle, or we just want to stay in the comfy warm sheets for a little bit longer. Regardless, so many of us hit that snooze button over and over again, picking up a few extra minutes under the covers (Robbins et al., 2025). However this between-alarm sleep is light and fragmented, since there is not enough time to complete another sleep cycle. We think we’re getting extra rest but we’re actually just ending up more groggy than if we’d used a single alarm for the time we actually wake up. In fact, research suggests these repeated wakings fragment that last stretch of sleep and drag out the grogginess (Ogawa et al., 2022). These extra snooze minutes aren’t a reward of extra sleep, they’re a tax on our own high quality sleep.

The morning starts the night before

To win the morning, we must first win the night before. The first step is to get enough sleep by going to bed at the appropriate time. Waking up is hard enough, don’t make it even harder on yourself by not getting enough sleep. Aim for a consistent 7-8 hours each night. Choose specific sleep and wake times and stick to these consistently. This will not only help you be well rested, but your body will adapt to the consistent times, making it much easier to fall asleep quickly and feel awake in the morning (Windred et al., 2023).

It is also best to cut screens and caffeine late in the day and keep your room cool and dark, so you fall asleep faster and sleep more deeply.

The habit breaker

The final piece of the puzzle (for me at least) and what I think is the most important part of the process is to force yourself to do something that wakes you up immediately when your alarm goes off. This will help create the habit of getting up, reinforce the connection between your alarm and waking up, and also help you stick with a consistent bedtime.

Choose a task that will help you shake off the sleepiness. I find exercise works great, since once my heart rate increases from doing something like push ups or squats, it would make it hard for me to fall back asleep even if I wanted to. Cold water also works well as it can provide a bit of a jolt, perhaps either splashing it on your face or hopping in a quick shower. A morning drink is also a fine choice, I used Last Alarm to create a “Make Espresso Alarm”, as I love having espresso every morning and the caffeine provides even more of a waking effect.

As for your actual alarm, get rid of that chain of alarms and be specific about exactly what time you want to get up. I learned the hard way that more alarms actually make waking up harder. So choose a specific time you want to get up, set an alarm, and stick with it.

It can be intimidating at first, you may worry “what if I do sleep through it?” One thing you can do, and I actually recommend regardless, is create a sequence of alarms for your whole morning routine. This is not a chain of alarms to snooze through, rather your 1st alarm is for waking up and perhaps your 2nd is for making coffee, your 3rd for starting breakfast, and so on for a handful of tasks in your morning routine. This can give you a bit of peace of mind in case you somehow manage to sleep through an alarm. However, you must not treat this as the snooze alarm chain of the past. You must force yourself to actually do the tasks the alarms are for, and that’s exactly what Last Alarm can help you with.

The hardest part is getting up

The honest truth is that all this effort and energy put into trying to change your wake-up routine will be for nothing if you can’t force yourself to get up and stay up. This is where I struggled the most, I had all the pieces in place but would still get up, go to the other room, turn off my alarm and get back in bed. I wanted to stop snoozing but I needed a nudge stronger than just telling myself to do a wake-up task in the morning. I needed to force myself to, and that is where Last Alarm came in.

I built Last Alarm because I recognized that the most effective way to ensure you succeed in your wake-up routine is if you had someone who literally forced you to complete whatever plan you decided on the night before. For most people however, including myself, that is not an option, so I built the next best thing, Last Alarm, which puts an accountability partner right on your phone and lets the you from last night hold this morning’s you to the plan.

Habits succeed when willpower isn’t enough

Building long-lasting habits is a marathon, not a sprint. So while it may feel impossible to change or create a new habit, just like all marathons, the process begins with a single step. Each day you succeed you will build confidence to propel you into the next day, then the next, and the next. Eventually the days will turn to weeks, and weeks into months, and you’ll see just how powerful making one small change can be if you are consistent with doing it over and over and over (Lally et al., 2010).

Start tomorrow

So that is it, the full playbook I used to finally stop snoozing. Get enough sleep on a consistent schedule, set one alarm for when you actually want to get up, keep your phone across the room, and the moment your feet hit the floor, do something that wakes you up. And whatever you do, do not get back in bed. If you want to see what snoozing is really costing you, the cost of snoozing calculator will put a number on it for you. And if you need that extra push to actually get up, give Last Alarm a try and never snooze again.

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