Recently, while working on Andy Puddicombe's story (coming soon on Hulry), I stumbled upon a set of soothing ringtones on the Headspace website.

While I was already using a gentle wake-up alarm tone using the Apple Health app's sleep schedule feature, these tones from Headspace sounded so relaxing that I wanted to try them for my morning alarm.

But adding custom alarm tones in iOS is not straightforward.

You must find a way to transfer a tone to the system's ringtones list to use it as your alarm tone.

Thankfully, there's a relatively easy way to do this via Apple Music.

If you use Apple Music, you can drag and drop custom MP3 files into the Music app on a Mac and add it to your library:

If, like me, you prefer to have neat titles and album art for this song in your library, you can right-click on the newly-created album, click Get Info and fill in the details:

Once added to the macOS Music app, this new song then gets synced to your iPhone via Apple Music:

With the song synced, the later part of this process is simple.

Create a new alarm as usual from the Clock app and tap on the Sound option to show a sound picker modal:

Here, you can tap on Pick a song and select the newly added tone from your Apple Music library.

The process is cumbersome, but since this is something you'd probably do only once or twice, it's worth taking this time and effort to wake up to a gentler alarm tone instead of one that gives you a scare every morning.

Try it if you have a Mac and iPhone and use Apple Music.

Now, if you don't already know, I wrote a book on Japanese philosophies I use in my everyday life, which makes a good read this holiday season and can be a positive start to your new year.

Before you move on to the rest of this newsletter issue, here are a few words from me as: