For anyone with any shred of anxiety, the thought of sleeping through your alarm and missing whatever you have planned is probably your worst nightmare.
Any time you have to wake up early, whether it's to get to the airport a few hours before your flight, or for an exam or work, you probably set about five different alarms to ensure that you wake up no matter what.
Naturally, the anxiety of making sure you wake up on time probably means it takes you far longer to get to sleep, unless you've mastered the military method, but even then, you're probably going to wake up and check your phone.
The fact is that most of us just rely on our technology far too much, and we put our faith in our phones to wake us up at exactly the right time, which really makes you wonder how people did it before alarm clocks and Apple existed.
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And unfortunately, as high tech as our phones might well be these days, they are still prone to the odd mistake or issue, and the concept of 'silent alarms' is now seemingly affecting a lot of users.
In a video with over 1.3 million views, TikTok user Brett Chody shared the story of how she missed a flight to Chicago because her alarm was going off without any noise.
She said: “I woke up at 6:30 on my own. My flight had taken off, and I picked up my phone and it said, ‘alarm going off’—but it was dead silent. It had been going off for two and a half hours.”
And it seems as if her comments agree that this isn't just a one-off, as she suggested that plenty more suggested that they'd gone through a similar experience.
Chody added: “100 people swiped up, maybe more, and were like, this happened to me. ‘I missed an exam, I missed a shift, I missed my first day of work. It’s been happening to me so much on my iPhone'."
She finished her video by telling people to 'maybe don’t trust your Apple alarm'.
People rushed to the comments to agree, with one user saying: “I don’t think u understand how often this happens."
Another commented: "Alarms are supposed to be alarming."
And a third wrote: "It happens to me daily."
Fortunately, for those of you who have struggled with this and not bothered to do anything about it, there's a simple fix.
If you head to the 'Ringtone and Alerts' section of your Settings, you can turn the volume all the way up before you go to bed ahead of an important wake up.
You can also disable 'Change with Buttons' if you're panicked that the volume might accidentally change.
If that still doesn't work, then you might want to turn off a feature called “Attention Aware Features', which automatically dims your phone brightness and turns the volume of alerts down if it realises that you aren't looking at it, which you presumably won't be doing when you're sleeping.
Perhaps the best hack though, is to just get yourself an alarm clock and escape the draining technique of your phone being the first and last thing you see when you go to bed and wake up.
James Moorhouse