Most of Us Hit Snooze. But What Is It Actually Doing to Us?
If you frequently hit the snooze button when your alarm goes off in the morning, you’re not alone: a new study found that 57 percent of adults habitually stayed in bed until the second (or third, or fourth) call to get up.
The snooze button’s pervasiveness demonstrates its popularity — you’ll struggle to locate a phone app or alarm clock without one — despite several expert cautions that snoozing is bad for us.
Alarms, according to sleep specialists, might theoretically disrupt our sleep cycles, making it more difficult to rouse ourselves. Half-asleep, the snooze button has never looked so appealing… But turning off the alarm for a few more minutes merely lulls our bodies into the next sleep cycle, only to be interrupted again.
Despite widespread condemnation of dozing, reliable research on its impacts is sparse, with most of what we know derived from studies on sleep or stress-related behaviors.
“The medical establishment is generally against the use of snoozing, but when we went to look at what hard data existed, there was none,” explains neuroscientist Stephen Mattingly of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
“We now have data to show how frequent it is — and there is still so much we don’t know.”
The 450-person study used data from regular sleep surveys and wearable devices to discover that ladies were 50% more likely than males to snooze. Meanwhile, regular snoozers tracked fewer steps each day than self-proclaimed non-snoozers, and their sleep patterns indicated greater indicators of sleep disturbance.
Sleep preferences were also taken into account. Night owls were found to utilize the snooze button more frequently and to be more weary overall. Younger folks were also more prone to nap.
None of this implies that there are clear causative ties between dozing and staying up late or being less active during the day — but it does indicate that while snoozing may feel wonderful for one person, it may not feel so good for another. As previous studies have shown, we all sleep differently.
Unsurprisingly, snoozers were more inclined to see the benefits of dozing, such as improved mood and feeling more awake afterward, but non-snoozers were more likely to disagree that similar benefits were conceivable.
The top reasons for hitting snooze were “I cannot get out of bed on my first alarm” and “because it is comfortable in my bed,” but the researchers pointed to the fact that one in three people in the US don’t get enough sleep as telling, and perhaps the main reason more than half of their study participants snoozed.
Critically, these numbers are only reflective of a small cohort that is likely to be in the best situation in terms of sleep patterns, according to Mattingly says.
“We have no idea about different age groups, such as teenagers, lower-income households, or any of the populations that have historically been more sleep deprived than the respondents in our survey.”
The researchers avoided declaring whether dozing was good or harmful for us, instead emphasizing that the need for any form of wake-up call is unlikely to be beneficial to our overall health.
In other words, more sleep is the answer, not less snoozes — sleep that is the appropriate length, regular in terms of scheduling, and as calm and undisturbed as possible.
In terms of snoozing, the researchers want to see more extensive studies with larger groups of people — not just to learn about the possible drawbacks of pushing the snooze button, but also some of the positives.
“If you snooze and are more aware when you get behind the vehicle to go to work, that could be an advantage and a beneficial one,” adds Mattingly. “It’s another thing if it lessens caffeine dependency.”
“It’s not uniformly unpleasant — similar to stress. Some stress is beneficial; that is why we have the fight or flight reaction. There are times and places for it. There may be times when pushing the snooze button is advantageous.”
Finally, snoozing is a widespread habit. We show early data that napping is associated with lighter sleep in the last hour before wake and greater resting HR throughout the night, both in general and on nights when one snoozes. Snoozing is not connected with lower sleep duration, greater drowsiness, or increased naps. Being female, younger, doing less daily steps, being less conscientious, having more disrupted sleep, and having a more evening chronotype all raised the risk of being a snoozer. More gold-standard research is required to understand the physiology of dozing and how napping should be addressed in sleep science.
Source: Sleep
