If there’s a life-or-death situation that I absolutely cannot miss, I’ll set two alarms 15 minutes apart.

But in all honestly, you should be able to wake up fresh without even having an alarm. It requires that you practice good sleep habits, including a consistent sleep schedule.

Practice getting up in response to your alarm.

Seriously.

Once or twice a day, in the middle of the day, go lay down in bed, like you’re going to sleep, and set your alarm for maybe 5-10 minutes. The moment it goes off, shut it off and stand up. Teach your body the habit of standing up, immediately, in response to the alarm. So long as you’re getting enough sleep, you’ll start doing it in the morning, on reflex.

Sleeping earlier should help, if the issue is falling asleep earlier, consider light exercise a couple hours before trying to sleep. I’m personally not a big fan of medicated sleep assist, but some people may need it.

I used to be a very deep sleeper. The things that helped me wake up on time were making sure I was tired enough at the end of each day to sleep soundly, and getting up at the same time daily. I usually wake up a bit before my alarm goes off these days.

I personally use Sleep as Android which comes with a bunch of options to help ensure you’ve actually woken up. I utilize the “captcha” option in which when I go to turn off the alarm, it displays a screen full of sheep and all of them but one are sleeping - you have to click the one that is “awake” in order to dismiss the alarm. I guess the process wakes up my brain just enough so that I don’t go back to sleep, whereas with a regular alarm that has just a simple dismiss button I’ll absolutely either hit dismiss or one of the volume buttons to turn off the alarm before I’ve fully woken up.

I also have it set to buzz on my watch for 90 seconds before playing a sound on my phone (which escalates in volume) - I’ve not had a problem waking up with this in the years that I’ve been using it.

There are other options too, such as answering math questions, scanning a QR code, pressing your phone to an NFC tag, heavily shaking the phone, one called “Say cheese!” that makes you smile as hard as you can and uses the camera to detect it, and one that you have to “laugh out loud”.

Electric shock alarm

I use an app called QR alarm or something. It only turns off when I scan its QR code which I’ve pinned to the other side of the room. Having to get up and actually think about scanning something helps me more than when I just used an alarm clock across the room

It sounds really counter intuitive, but wake up slower. It’s really easy for me to startle awake just enough completely turn off my alarm, not just snooze, and fall back asleep hard. If I wake up to an alarm that slowly increases in volume from barely audible, then I tend to wake up much more gently and slower. That little bit of extra time means makes it much harder to fall back asleep and by the time I reach for my alarm to silence or even snooze it. I’m clear headed enough to not either actually snooze the alarm instead of turning it off or be awake enough to not fall back asleep at all. Going from awake straight to sitting up or standing is super stressful and just makes everything awful. Being mostly awake before my head even leaves the pillow is much less stressful.

There are alarm clock apps which can help. You may configure how unforgiving the alarm becomes.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kog.alarmclock

Changed my life.

If you’re going to bed with music or sound, make sure it’s at a barely audible level or shuts off after you fall asleep. Otherwise your brain gets used to tuning out the noise and will tune out your alarm

• Get a cheap old fashioned alarm clock (we’re talking about something that costs maybe 10 bucks).
• Put it out of reach so that you have to physically get out of bed to turn it off.
• Configure it to go off at the appropriate time with the nastiest sound (usually they have an “alarm with a radio” and an “alarm with alarm sound” modes and you definitely want to have it in the latter mode, not the former).

It’s a pretty horrible way to wake up if you went to bed late (protip: stop drinking coffee and using a computer after 11PM to deal with the whole only falling asleep late part of the problem) and that’s why it works.

Despite the name being stupid, Alarm Clock Extreme is a great app. I paid for it years ago, and have recently paid for it again due to it being bought out by another company. I do not feel cheated by this fact. It’s been worth it.

Get a timer controlled power outlet and hook a Hitachi magic wand to it. Place the wand under your pillow. The vibration is super intense and gets uncomfortable at the highest setting. Bonus points you can wake and bate since you have a massager handy.

It’s a bit microtransactional but alarm clock extreme for Android is a good solution for me https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alarmclock.xtreme.free

It was a lot better before AVG labs bought it from the original dev though. They discarded all original purchases making it like they never happened. That said, I’ve bought it twice because it’s so good.

If you are sleeping so heavily that you sleep through your alarm every time, you probably aren’t getting enough sleep. Go to bed earlier.

No sure shot but it does sound like it’s not the alarm that’s the problem. You’ve trained yourself to be able to ignore your alarm, that it doesn’t mean “get-out-of-bed” time to your unconscious brain. Change the alarm tone on your phone and have a few practice sessions. Set your new alarms after a short nap and as soon as those alarms go off throw off all the covers and stand up fully as soon as you can. The idea is to retrain your brain to get up all the way at the sound of that alarm.

Another thing that’s really helped me personally is installing a smart light bulb that turns itself on just before my sound alarms start going off. That way I’m not trying to force myself awake in a dark noisy room.