[fatnoah]

I haven't used an alarm for over 10 years at this point. I realized that I was almost always waking up about 5-10 minutes before the alarm went off. Some experimentation showed that by thinking of a time before I went to bed, I could wake myself up around that time, even it was 2 or 3am.

Now, I only set alarms for early times, and only as a back-up. Unless I'm very sleep deprived, they're not needed.

To answer OP, over the past year, I've been on a quest to wake up earlier, and the answer has been a dull one. I've very slowly started going to sleep earlier. I started with an average "asleep" time of 1-2am, and am now at about 11pm. That's shifted my normal wake time from 7:30am to 6:30am. Those good at math will note that's actually more sleep, which has been great, too.