What 373 Alarmy Users' Alarm Logs Say About Their Mornings

Every morning an alarm app keeps a small diary nobody asked it to write: when the alarm was due, how many times it rang, how long it took to switch off, what the person had to do to make it stop. A 2024 study from a Korean research team put that diary next to an actual mood diary, and the result is a useful, limited map of which alarm behaviors go with feeling good or bad in the morning.

The study, by Oh and colleagues in JMIR Human Factors (2024), recruited 373 users of the Alarmy app, 232 in the United States and 141 in South Korea, with an average age of 23.9. For two weeks each of them answered a daily survey about nine morning emotions and their bedtime, and shared their Alarmy logs. The headline: later alarm times, fewer alarms per morning and an earlier bedtime went with better mornings, while task-based dismissal and loud sounds went with more nervousness and annoyance. All of it is correlation, in one app, over two weeks.

What a typical morning looked like in the logs

The average first alarm rang at 7:11 a.m. On alarm days participants used about 1.7 alarms. The mean time between the alarm ringing and being switched off was around 12 minutes, but with a standard deviation near 25 minutes, so a minority of very long mornings pulls the average up. Among tasks used to dismiss the last alarm, 51.2% were done in bed and 16.3% out of bed. Loud sounds were used 5.8% of the time and a label on the last alarm 29.9% of the time.

The associations that held up

Reading only the results with p-values at or under .05, four patterns stand out.

Mornings with more alarms ringing went with more annoyance and tiredness and with feeling less refreshed. A later first alarm went the other way: more refreshed, more peaceful, less tired. A longer wait between the ring and the switch-off went with less happiness, and a loud sound on the last alarm went with more annoyance (odds ratio 1.611). A text label on the last alarm, meanwhile, went with more hopefulness and less annoyance.

The fourth pattern is the one about tasks. Dismissing the last alarm with a task went with nervousness, with an odds ratio of 1.655 for in-bed tasks and 2.229 for out-of-bed ones. A later bedtime went with more tiredness and more depression.

Two of these are close to arithmetic. A later alarm usually means more sleep, and a later bedtime means less. The paper has no objective sleep measure, only reported bedtime, so the “alarm effect” of a later time is hard to separate from the sleep effect.

Details on how the study was run

Which wake-up tasks counted as in bed and which as out of bed?

The authors list typing, math, memory and shaking as in-bed tasks, and walking, squats, photo and barcode as out-of-bed tasks. The most common single mission was the plain touch-a-button one, used on average 32.4% of the time. Both categories were measured as the share of tasks performed after the last alarm.

Who paid for the study and who saw the data first?

Participants were paid US$43 each. The alarm logs came through a research agreement with Delightroom, and two of the seven authors list Delightroom as their affiliation. The Hanyang University review board exempted the study from informed consent (HYUIRB-202205-011). A reader judging independence should know it.

Did people report their mood right after the alarm?

Not always. A survey link went out 30 minutes after the alarm was set to ring, and a follow-up link at 10 a.m. went to anyone who had not answered. Some of the ‘morning’ emotions were therefore reported hours after waking, when the first fifteen minutes of a bad morning may already have faded.

Why the task result is the one to read slowly

The authors conclude that active wake-up tasks “can induce stress and discomfort,” and their practical advice is to avoid pictures and exercises immediately on waking. The data are compatible with that. They are equally compatible with the reverse, and the authors themselves cite earlier work suggesting that people who struggle to wake on time are the ones who pick hard alarms. A nervous, sleep-deprived person chooses a mission; the mission did not necessarily make them nervous.

Nothing in the study can separate the two, because nobody was assigned a task. And the result is odd in one respect: both kinds of task go with nervousness, and out-of-bed tasks more so, yet out-of-bed tasks were also the rarest (16.3%). Where a category is rare, a few nervous people can move the estimate. The text also does not state the reference category the task variables were compared against.

Where that leaves a proof-of-waking alarm

An alarm that asks for a short video, such as the one described in how DontSnooze works, is also a task done in front of an audience, so the nervousness finding may carry over; the Alarmy logs cannot say. For someone whose problem is missing the morning, a tense minute may be a fair price. For someone who mainly wants a calmer 7 a.m., the associations above (a later alarm, a single alarm, an earlier bedtime, a label) are worth trying, though none was randomized.

What the study cannot settle

Other limits apply. Participants were young (mean age 23.9), self-selected from the users of a single app, and paid. The nine emotions came from a 29-person pilot survey. The odds ratios sit beside confidence intervals that appear to belong to the underlying model coefficients, so the odds ratios here are quoted as the paper prints them. For how the missions themselves work, a teardown of the Alarmy puzzle alarm covers the mechanics. On loudness, what the alarm-sound research found is the better guide, since this study only knows loud or not.