Waking up early is hard enough as it is, unless you’re an early bird. It’s even harder if you have a stressful, noisy atmosphere by your bed.

Check out the clever scheme this college student put into place to get back at his inconsiderate roommate.

I secretly trained my roommate to not respond to his morning alarms

My dorm roommate had been pretty lousy. He constantly left the room a mess, left his stuff on my side of the room and on my bed, stole my alcohol, used my stuff without permission, never cleaned up my dishes after he used them and a bunch of other stuff.

I confronted him about all these issues on several occasions and got the Resident Advisor involved with the alcohol stealing issue because he was under 21. Things still continued anyway.

Enough was enough.

He asked me once if it was okay if his girl spent the night and I said no. We were in the middle of a pandemic, plus that’s especially weird if i was there.

I also had to wake up every day at 8 for work, which he knew and he would stay up until 2 am playing video games some nights.

Not to mention, he would set like 10 alarms in the morning with a bunch of different alarm tones.

I hit a breaking point and decided to do something cruel. Every morning when I woke up, I’d observe his alarm pattern and how he’d respond.

He had several alarms that he’d ignore, all with the same sound. He had a couple half-hour alarms that had a unique sound (also ignored) and then the final alarm had its own sound too. All of them were default iPhone sounds.

His brain had been trained to this alarm pattern for a while, I’d assumed.

So he put a plan in motion.

I started step one of the punishment: set up a sequence of alarms on my phone, identical to his sequence, but an hour early.

He responded to my alarms the exact same way he’d respond to his own. I kept this up for a week, and his brain was eventually re-trained to sleep through double the amount of alarms as before.

Then, phase two kicked in: random inconsistencies in my alarm pattern. Some days I’d play all the alarms, while other days I’d only play one that his brain was trained to ignore.

That way, his brain expects to sleep through like 20 alarms and only ever hears 11. He slept through his alarm at least 4 times in two weeks.

Eventually he finally changed his alarm pattern so he’d only have one alarm and he no longer had the energy to stay up until 2am.

Here is what people are saying.

Exactly. Your brain needs more sleep. Waking up, falling half-asleep and then waking up again doesn’t qualify.

I have set Florence and the Machine’s Dog Days as my alarm. It helps me wake up peaceful and happily.

I’m not sure that this actually works, but why not?

Pavlov would be proud. I should try this on my dog.

That sounds like too much work.

I can’t imagine sharing a dorm room.

If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.