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Is Snoozing The Alarm Good Or Bad For Your Health?

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When the alarm goes off in the early morning, it’s tempting to hit the snooze button and curl back under the warm covers for a few more minutes of slumber.

This repeated postponing of the buzzer is often thought of as a bad habit—one that creates not only a lazy start to a day but also a fragmented sleep pattern that’s detrimental to health. Now, however, a growing body of recent research is contradicting this notion.

A new study published in the Journal of Sleep Research found that people who regularly press the snooze button lost only about six minutes of sleep per night—and that it didn’t affect their morning sleepiness or mood. In fact, tests showed that it actually improved cognition. This adds to research in 2022 that also found chronic snoozers generally felt no sleepier than nonsnoozers.

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Scientific American spoke with sleep experts on the science of snoozing and how the habit may actually be good for you—if you do it right.

Snoozing does shorten sleep, Sundelin says, but she maintains that it’s not as bad as scientists once thought. Past research has suggested that the extra minutes snoozers get don’t really help them feel more rested—and repeatedly waking up and trying to sleep again has been thought to prevent the restorative stages of sleep, including rapid-eye movement (REM).

Other research has suggested that waking someone in the middle of their sleep cycle causes them to feel sleepier throughout the day. “If you disturb someone’s sleep, it’s not good-quality sleep, and they often feel tired afterward—but this [idea] is based on a whole night of sleep fragmentation,” explains Sundelin, who adds that most theories about snoozing are “inferred from what we know about sleep in general.”

Thirty-one such chronic snoozers who were observed in the study slept well throughout the night and only showed signs of fragmented sleep in the last 30 minutes before getting up, which is typically around the time that people first hit the snooze button. But this fragmented sleep “didn’t have a big enough impact to make them tired” throughout the rest of the day, Sundelin says.

Sundelin’s research also suggests that snoozing may help people shake off morning drowsiness by easing the transition from deep sleep to a lighter stage. A good night’s rest typically involves four to five sleep cycles, each made up of four stages. Light sleep happens in the first two stages of nonrapid eye movement (NREM). This is when muscles start to relax, and brain activity slows, along with breathing and heart rate—but a person can still be easily woken. As the night goes on, people progressively reach deeper stages. It gets harder to wake up during the third and final stages of NREM and the first stage of REM. A person who receives a phone call during these stages, for example, may be less likely to hear it or remember answering.

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