When you’re sleep-deprived, you require longer, deeper sleep periods. The desire to hit snooze may also relate to whether you’re suffering from sleep loss. Night owls prefer to stay awake for longer at night and sleep later into the morning, making it difficult to get up in the morning and often resulting in a truncated sleep. The circadian rhythm of early birds allows them to fall asleep earlier and therefore they’re more likely to complete their natural sleep cycle by the time the alarm goes off in the morning. People who are morning birds generally find it easier to wake up unaided while us night owls find it a lot harder. The first relates to diurnal preferences. While the ability to resist hitting the snooze button may just come down to self-control, there are two biological reasons why some of us are more inclined to do so. This means you miss out on the recovery benefits of consolidated sleep, and your ability to function effectively during the rest of the day may be impaired. The end result is that the last proportion of your sleep becomes highly fragmented. Except this time when your alarm goes off, if you’re in a deeper stage of sleep, it’s a lot harder to wake up. So when you hit snooze and fall back asleep, your sleep cycle starts from the beginning. This may lead to an increase in sleep inertia, the groggy feeling you have immediately upon waking, and often the inevitable snoozing cycle. When we use an alarm clock, we may be woken during the middle of a sleep cycle when our bodies have not had time to fully prepare us for waking. ![]() If we were to sleep naturally without that pesky alarm clock, these factors would allow our bodies to gradually prepare for waking. Shortly before waking, our sleep becomes lighter, our core body temperature rises and levels of hormones such as cortisol increase. The rationale: Hitting the snooze button disrupts your partner’s sleep, causing stress in the relationship.Each time we fall asleep, sleep starts at the beginning of the cycle. It might not be a very scientific finding but one survey reported that the more one partner hits the snooze button, the lower the other’s relationship satisfaction. The reason: Rolling over and falling back asleep after the alarm puts you back into slow wave or deep sleep waking from that stage of sleep makes sleep inertia worse, according to a study published in the Journal of Sleep Research. Hitting the snooze button can extend that period of grogginess. During the time it takes to wake up, you experience grogginess and mental fog known as sleep inertia.įor some people, sleep inertia lasts a few minutes, for others it takes much longer - sometimes up to a few hours - to wear off. Quan compares waking up to revving the engine in a car: You don’t go from zero to 60 - or sound asleep to wide awake - right away. Research published in the journal Sleep Medicine found repeated sleep interruptions, which occur when you jolt awake and fall asleep each time the alarm goes off and the snooze button is hit, have the same negative impact on mood and attention span as getting no sleep at all. In fact, Terry Cralle, MS, RN, certified sleep educator for the Better Sleep Council, argues “The little bit of sleep you get in the time between alarms is fragmented, poor quality sleep that won’t make you feel any more well-rested than getting out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off.” “It’s most likely a lack of sleep causing you to hit the snooze button but it’s not a bad idea to rule out other causes,” he says.Įven if you manage to fall back to sleep after silencing the alarm clock, the nine minutes before the alarm sounds again is not enough time to overcome a sleep deficit. Less common disorders like narcolepsy or circadian rhythm issues could also be to blame. Obstructive sleep apnea is one of the most common reasons someone needs several alarms to wake up in the morning or has to hit the snooze button countless times before getting out of bed, according to Quan. Although a compulsive need to log just a little more time between the sheets after the alarm goes off could be a bad habit, the inability to rise and shine when the alarm goes off could also be a sign of a sleep disorder.
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