When you set your alarm for 6:00 a.m. this morning, you thought you’d selected an appropriate time. But maybe you stayed up a little too late, or maybe you tossed and turned a little too much. Now it’s 6:09 a.m., and you’re tempted to press the snooze button a second time.
Most sleep scientists advise against pressing the snooze button after the alarm sounds on an alarm clock or a smartphone, as the sleep that snoozing provides isn’t particularly beneficial. But a new study in Scientific Reports suggests that the practice is popular around the world, finding that the snooze button is pushed in around 56 percent of sleep sessions worldwide.
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The Prevalence of Pressing Snooze
Whether on an alarm clock or a smartphone, most alarm systems today feature snooze functions, which set an additional alarm, when activated, several minutes after an initial alarm sounds. These functions allow sleepers to supplement their sleep when they wake up tired, though the sleep that they provide is poor and too short to provide any actual benefits.
Indeed, available studies suggest that snoozing is associated with a stronger sense of drowsiness upon waking up, and is also tied to more sleep arousals, less sleep time, and lower sleep efficiency than uninterrupted sleep. As such, sleep scientists tend to discourage snoozing, though there aren’t too many scientific studies out there that consider its prevalence.
“Many of us hit the snooze alarm in the morning with the hope of getting a ‘little more sleep,’ but this widely practiced phenomenon has received little attention in sleep research,” said Rebecca Robbins, a researcher in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, according to a press release.
Setting out to learn more, Robbins and a team turned to information from SleepCycle, a smartphone application for sleep analysis that also includes an alarm clock and a snooze functionality. Studying 3,017,276 sleep sessions from 21,222 SleepCycle users, the researchers found that the practice of snoozing was widespread. In fact, around 55.6 percent of sleep sessions concluded with snooze alarms, with the average sleeper spending 10.8 minutes snoozing after their initial alarm.
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Snoozing Patterns
Though the average sleeper pressed snooze around 2.4 times, more snooze alarms were activated by women (at around 2.5 alarms) than by men (at around 2.3 alarms). And that wasn’t the only interesting pattern that the researchers revealed.
Some days saw more snooze alarms than others, as more snoozing occurred on weekdays than on weekends. And some countries saw more snoozing than others, too, with sleepers in the U.S., Sweden, and Germany setting snooze alarms most and those in Japan and Australia setting snooze alarms least.
Unsurprisingly, sleepers snoozed less when they went to bed earlier than their typical time and more when they went to bed later. But surprisingly, the study subjects with the shortest sleep schedules tended to press snooze least. It’s possible that this pattern is related to the sleepers’ responsibilities, the researchers say, as the occupations and other obligations of those who sleep less may require them to rise out of bed immediately after their alarm sounds.
Despite its prevalence, the researchers stress that snooze alarms aren’t always the best approach for supplementing sleep.
“Unfortunately, the snooze alarm disrupts some of the most important stages of sleep,” Robbins said in the release. “The hours just before waking are rich in rapid eye movement sleep. Hitting the snooze alarm will interrupt these critical stages of sleep and typically only offer you light sleep in between snooze alarms.”
As such, try setting your alarm later and actually listening to it.
“The best approach for optimizing your sleep and next day performance is to set your alarm for the latest possible time,” Robbins said in the release. “Then commit to getting out of bed when your first alarm goes off.”
This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.
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Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
