Reaching For The Snooze Button? You're Not Alone
By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, May 22, 2025 — Nearly everyone at some point has groggily grappled with their alarm clock, seeking to slap the snooze bar and grab a few extra Z’s.
But sleep experts recommend against seeking the snooze button, as it can mess with healthy slumber.
Now a new study shows that nearly half of people around the world use the snooze button most mornings, to their detriment.
About 45% of people hit the snooze button on more than 80% of their mornings, snoozing an average 20 minutes extra a day, according to results published May 19 in the journal Scientific Reports.
“Unfortunately, the snooze alarm disrupts some of the most important stages of sleep,” lead researcher Rebecca Robbins, a sleep expert at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said in a news 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,” she said.
For the study, researchers analyzed sleep data from more than 21,000 people using SleepCycle, a smartphone sleep-monitoring app. The data covered six months and more than 3 million sleep sessions.
The snooze button was pressed in close to 56% of those 3 million nights, results show. Everyone in the study spent an extra 11 minutes snoozing on average, but heavy users snoozed even more, around 20 minutes on average.
Longer sleep sessions of more than nine hours were more likely to end with snooze alarm use than people getting healthy sleep of seven to nine hours or short sleep of less than seven hours, the study says.
People who slept five or fewer hours in particular rarely used the snooze alarm, possibly because their job responsibilities required them to be up-and-at-it with no time for snoozing, researchers said.
Heavy snooze alarm users also had more erratic sleep schedules, researchers found.
Snooze alarms were most often used on weekdays, peaking on Wednesdays, researchers said.
People in the U.S., Sweden and Germany most frequently used the snooze button, while folks in Japan and Australia used it the least.
Robbins said for best sleep, she recommends people lose the snooze.
“The best approach for optimizing your sleep and next day performance is to set your alarm for the latest possible time, then commit to getting out of bed when your first alarm goes off,” Robbins said.
Sources
- Brigham and Women’s Hospital, news release, May 19, 2025
Disclaimer: Statistical data in medical articles provide general trends and do not pertain to individuals. Individual factors can vary greatly. Always seek personalized medical advice for individual healthcare decisions.
© 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Posted May 2025
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