Waking up to a beeping alarm can be frightening and make you jump out of bed, which isn’t good for you. Research has found that shrieking alarms increase your heart rate and blood pressure. That’s no way to start your day – in fact, it can totally ruin it – so you should instead choose to wake up to a podcast.
What is a podcast alarm? A podcast alarm is basically when you program a podcast you love to wake you up, sort of like a radio alarm will play a radio station. It ensures that you can hear something interesting as soon as you open your eyes.
It’s a gentler way to get out of bed – and you don’t need any special devices to make it happen. With this in mind, here’s how to set a podcast alarm on your smartphone.
How To Set A Podcast Alarm With An App
You can turn your smartphone into an alarm – a more heart-friendly alarm! – by downloading an app that will use podcasts instead of music or sounds to wake you up in the morning.
The app is called Podcast Alarm and it’s available on iPhone – it costs $2,99. It’s currently not available on Android, but they’re working on it.
Once you’ve downloaded it to your phone, all you have to do is follow these easy steps:
- Search for the podcast you want to wake you up in the mornings. Go to “Discover view”, then select or search for your favorite podcast, and press on the “+” icon to queue a selected episode.
- To set it as an alarm, you want to press the “Queue” tab so you can see the list of episodes you’ve downloaded.
- Press the “Alarm” tab to set an alarm. Choose the time of day you want the podcast to start playing. What’s great about using podcasts as alarms is that you can use them at various times of the day, such as when you want to start a workout or take a break from your computer screen.
- You can also choose repeating days for the alarm, such as every weekday at 7 a.m. After saving the alarm, you’ll see it in the “Alarm view.” This also enables you to edit it if required.
What’s cool about this app is that you can ensure you always listen to the latest episode of your favorite podcast so you’re always getting the most up-to-date news or most recent fun.
- To do this, choose the source type from “Alarm view.”
- Select “Automatic” for the source type, then choose the podcast from your list of subscribed shows.
- Set the alarm as you normally would. This ensures you’ll hear the latest episode available on the podcast the next time your alarm goes off.
Can You Set A Podcast Alarm For Apple Podcasts?
If you have an iPhone and you want to wake up to your favorite Apple podcast, you can do this with the Next Up app, which is free on iOS.
This has some excellent features, such as that the app syncs with your subscribed podcasts so you don’t need to have them in more than one place.
You can skip over episodes you might’ve already caught up on, change your alarm’s snooze duration, skip intro ads, and set the right volume you want. You can also choose to seamlessly continue listening from your Music app, for the ultimate convenience.
How To Set A Podcast Alarm On Android Devices
If you own an Android phone, don’t worry – you can still set a podcast alarm on your device. Again, you just need the right app to get the job done. An Android app that works well to enable you to wake up listening to your favorite podcasts is UnreliAlarm.
This offers both music and podcast alarms, so you’ll be able to mix things up.
How it works is that you need a podcast app or two on your phone for this app to sync with. It basically sends a play command to the podcast app of your choice so that it will start to run.
As long as you have an episode to play in the queue, it will start playing when you’ve set your alarm. If you want to purchase UnreliAlarm, it costs $0.99.
Related Questions
What are some popular podcast apps for your smartphone?
There are many podcasts that you can enjoy on your phone, such as Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Many of them are completely free so you can enjoy them whenever you want.
Do podcasts use a lot of data?
Although podcasts use less data than video streaming, they can still notch up a large amount of data. For example, a podcast that lasts an hour can use up about 60MB. This is something to bear in mind before you play your favorite episodes back-to-back.
Conclusion
Waking up to a loud, shrieking alarm is not on. It can certainly make you get out of bed the wrong way. That’s why you need to invest in a quality smartphone app that will wake you up with the soothing sounds of your favorite podcast.
In this article, we’ve looked at some iOS and Android options if you want to wake up to this instead of those annoying alarm.
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