What can I do to stop sleeping through my alarm?

Do you have a friend that can call you?
Set their ringtone to the most obnoxious thing you can think of (think Roseanne Barr), and ask that they call you twice.

Surely there’s a phone ap that will keep calling you until you enter some sort of code?

1. Go to bed earlier.
2. Stop taking, using, or drinking anything that puts you out.
3. Ask someone to call you, and have them insist that you speak whole words in answer, words with both vowels and consonants that make you shape sounds and not just grunt, and answer intelligibly.
4. Have a checkup to make sure there’s nothing physically wrong.
5. Suffer some consequences. That’s pretty motivational.

There are no mechanisms to achieve this that are foolproof. (Recall that “nothing is foolproof, because fools are so ingenious”.)

Nothing will fix this problem short of:
1. Getting adequate sleep, and
2. Making the decision that you will get up and stay up when it is time to, and then
3. Sticking to that decision.

As @Jeruba has correctly noted (in first place, also correctly) you need to go to bed earlier. At your age you should know how long you sleep “normally” when you’re not under the influence of drugs and alcohol, when you haven’t had too much liquid to drink before going to be (so that your bladder isn’t waking you earlier than you would arise on your own) and when it just “feels right” to get up (and even though you might choose to sleep in when given your druthers, when it “feels like a guilty pleasure” to do that).

For me, that’s seven hours. I’ve known that for fifty years. If I get less than seven hours of sleep in a normal night, then I’m going to have difficulty (generally) getting out of bed the next day. I can do that easily enough several times a month if I need to, as I often do need to for travel, early-morning meetings and other such appointments. But I can’t do it routinely, so I don’t try to. It will make me cranky, inefficient, tired and ill-feeling all day, and I don’t like that feeling. So I go to bed when my body tells me “it’s time”, and I sleep without alarms of any kind except for those special occasions. And when the alarm goes off on a “special occasion” day, I have already made the decision that I have to get up or the day is really going to go to hell: if I miss my flight; if I’m late for a team meeting or a doctor’s appointment, or if I let down my boss in some way, then there will be hell to pay. And I dislike that even more than the extra sleep I could get if I ignore the alarm.

On weekends and vacation days I absolutely love to stay up late and sleep until noon (or read until I fall asleep and then wake up, read some more, nap and read again) or until the dorg tells me, “Dude, it’s time.”

Your body is telling you that you are failing to account for its needs. It’s high time that you start.

Are you able to continue sleeping with a bright light on? Get a timer for a lamp with a hundred watt bulb to shine on you.

Yes, and there all kinds of wake-up lights and alternatives, @zenvelo.

It sounds to me like a severe case of sleep deprivation. I would seriously consider some professional consultation.

If your bedroom isn’t on a ground floor where anyone can walk by and look in, sleep with your curtains and window shades open. If you need to get up very early in the morning, this trick doesn’t work so well during these short, winter months. For most of the year, though, the growing sunlight will ease you in consciousness.

Put one alarm clock on your nightstand, and another across the room. Set the closer alarm to ring about an hour before you need to get up; the noise may not wake you fully, but it’ll disturb your sleep. Then, when the far-away alarm rings, you’ll be in a better state to get up, turn it off, and really be awake. Just the odious thought of that 2nd alarm blaring might help you move from sleep to alert.

Oh, yes, I just remembered a trick of mine from my old gotta-get-up days. I kept my bedside alarm set ahead, an odd amount of time, usually 27 minutes. (This was a real alarm clock with a real ringer, not some pissy little beeper.) When it went off, my first reaction was “Holy crap, I’m late.” This was followed by “Wait, I know the clock is set ahead.” But in that state I was much too groggy to compute the real time, so it was “The hell with it, I might as well get up.”

This stupid trick worked on me for years and years, even better than keeping the electric alarm clock on a shelf above my head so that when I yanked on the cord to pull it down, it hit me on the head. I would wake up later to find it stuffed under my pillow.

So yeah, I understand the problem.

Set a couple of them out of arms reach.

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Go to bed earlier. If you can’t go to bed earlier, because of work or some obligation, then take a nap during the day.

If you are already sleeping 9+ hours every day then consider getting a thyroid test. 9+ hours in a 24 hour period. It could be 6 hours at night and a 3 hour nap in the afternoon.

Don’t drink alcohol the night before.

Do you have someone that could hide it for you? If so, ask them to hide it somewhere very discreet. Also set alarms for, example, 6:00 6:01 6:02 6:03 etc. Maybe, if you can do sound recordings record your voice doing something super annoying like the Minios in Despicable Me. Weeeohhh Weeeohhh Weeeohhh, you get the gist.

This question only tells half of the story. What are your nighttime habits like? Are you sleeping soundly?

If you have to, set an alarm for yourself to go to sleep on time. Make sure you get at least eight hours (or however much your body needs.)

Stay away from computer screens, tvs, and loud noises in the last hour before bed. Wind down by turning off a few lights and quietly reading a book. Don’t multitask during this time.

If you exercise in the evening, try to do it earlier in the day. Also try not to eat anything right before you have to be asleep.

Turn down the heat in the room and have plenty of warm blankets on your bed.

You might have an issue like sleep apnea, where your breathing is interrupted during sleep and you wake up many times during the night. If nothing else works, go to the doctor to be checked for this.

Drinking also leads to poor-quality sleep, because it interrupts your REM cycle. This sounds really obvious, but don’t drink on days when you have your 8 AM class.

Also, try to cut down on caffeine. I used to prop myself up throughout the day with multiple caffeinated drinks. This combined with being hung over led to severe dehydration, and the caffeine was also keeping me up at night while being really tired. Try to have one (or at most, two) coffee drinks early in the day, and drink water if you get tired later.

You need one of these. It goes off and won’t stop until you step on it and stay on it for so many seconds.

@PuffUvSmoke reminds me that the most effective (annoying) alarm clock I ever had was a Little Green Sprout talking alarm. Every morning he would say, in a kid’s sing-songy voice, “It’s time to get up! It’s time to get up! As we say in the valley, have a Ho, Ho, WHOLE lot of fun today!” I believed it to be collectible, so I put it away before I pulverized it.

There might be something to choosing your own wake-up call. Maybe your mom could record something for you that you could set really loud?

The night before an attack members of some Indian tribes would drink a lot of water. Their bladders woke them up early in the morning.
Give it a try – in addition to the good advice offered above.

Hey @15barcam , Did you try the drink water before bed trick. Tell us how it worked out for you.

Use your phone!

Well, develop a steady sleeping rhythm so you will wake up naturally at the same time everyday.

Take a warm shower. It might help you relax into sleep.

One of my roommates in college had a wind-up Baby Ben alarm clock It was so loud it would scare me!

I set another alarm a few minutes earlier and got up so I would be ready when his went off.
Eventually he started ignoring it and letting just ring out. Then he’d fall back to sleep.
One day I’d had enough. I took the Baby Ben outside and shot it. I brought the carcass back inside, put it on his dresser with a few $ to pay for a new clock radio. He did. And kept the pieces on is dresser for a long time.

There is actually nothing you can do about it unless you are determined to do so. First thing is to get adequate sleep so that you do not feel sleepy and weary in the morning. So, sleep early. Then, before going to sleep tell yourself a few times that “I’m not going to wake up say at 6 o’ clock”. Do be convinced that you can do it. Secondly, do not snooze your alarm.