At least, this is the opinion of Dan Ariely, a psychologist and behavioral economist who answers reader questions in the Wallstreet Journal. If you’re someone who snoozes every morning, chances are you are conditioning yourself to ignore the sound of your alarm. You’re more likely to sleep longer than intended Here are five reasons to not hit your snooze button: 1. Taking nine minutes to stretch your body and your mind, letting yourself wake up, and having that snooze alarm as an insurance policy isn't going to do much harm - provided you aren't so exhausted you'll go right back to sleep in the first place.Is snoozing bad? - according to most sleep experts, yes. Snoozing repeatedly is clearly not going to do ourselves any favors. In an ideal world, we'd sleep according to our natural chronotype, which would let us go to sleep and wake at the time that best fit our own personal biological needs (some of us are always going to be earlier or later risers than others).īut we don't live in that world, so we have to make do with what we can. You don't want to interrupt a REM cycle with a snooze, since you might kickstart a new sleep cycle process if you fall asleep again - but if you woke up in the middle of slow-wave sleep (a deeper cycle), a brief snooze might give you a short time in REM that transitions you to being more awake. It might even make things better if it happens that you were jerked awake from a particularly deep sleep cycle to hit snooze, neuroscientist and sleep researcher Jeanne Duffy told Daniel Engber at Popular Science in 2015. If you're so tired that you're going to go right back to sleep, snoozing is not going to do you any favors, but if it's just an insurance policy as you let yourself awaken, it may do no harm. 'The extra 10 minutes you get by snoozing can actually help to gently awaken the mind, rather than jolt it back to wakefulness.'ĭinges says that if you aren't letting yourself fall totally back asleep but instead are using that snooze time to gently awaken, that's not so bad. 'Snoozing is not a great evil,' David Dinges, chief of the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, tells The Wall Street Journal. Instead of recognizing it as the 'get out of bed' tone, it's the 'just a few minutes more' sound - something that can continue indefinitely.īut is an extra nine minutes all that bad? (Lore has it that back when alarm clocks were mechanical, the snooze button was attached to the part controlling minutes, so it was traditionally set to nine for the longest rest possible, a tradition that modern smartphone makers have reportedly held to.

To make matters worse, psychology professor and behavioral economist Dan Ariely argues that by hitting the snooze button repeatedly, we're training our minds to be confused by the alarm sound. And as psychologist Maria Konnikova writes in the New Yorker, the beginning of a sleep cycle 'is the worst point to be woken up,' leaving us feeling like we slept poorly in the first place. This kicks in the production of hormones that encourage deep sleep. If you aren't getting enough sleep, you're more likely to fall back into the beginning of a sleep cycle after hitting the button, as a popular AsapScience video on the topic explains. Perhaps the most insidious snooze effect hits those who are already overtired. Most sleep scientists agree that you'd be better off getting real rest for that hour. The most basic anti-snooze argument is a straightforward one - and one that especially applies to those who like to hit the button over and over, dragging out the waking process for an hour.

But don't lose all hope, lovers of the brief respite that the snooze offers - if not overdone, there are ways that snoozing can help or be properly used, according to researchers. If anything, it can make it harder for you to wake up. Most sleep researchers says snoozing won't make you any more rested. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

Snooze 5 minutes