At 6:45 a.m., your first alarm goes off, and you press the snooze button. 6:54 a.m., your second alarm goes off, and again, you hit snooze. Then again, every nine minutes until you realize you can't press the snooze button anymore or you'll be late for work.
A 2022 Sleep study found 57% of participants fell into this category of snoozers, but how can that impact our minds and bodies?
Hitting the snooze button fragments your sleep
According to Emily McDonald, a neuroscientist based in Florida, waking to multiple alarms disrupts the later phases of sleep, such as REM sleep and slow wave sleep (deep sleep).
"Let's say you start your day with 30 minutes of snoozing — your last 30 minutes of sleep was poor-quality interrupted sleep. So, pressing snooze once or twice may not be the worst thing, but more than that is not advised due to its effects on cognition and mood," McDonald told Business Insider.
"If the first alarm sounds and jolts you out of slow wave sleep (deep sleep) or REM, pressing snooze allows you to re-enter into a lighter stage of sleep (N1 or N2) before having to fully wake up," McDonald said.
She explains that sleep inertia is a transition period from sleep to wakefulness that is characterized by impaired performance and drowsiness. Research has found snoozers are more likely to feel drowsy when they wake up but that they're also more likely to be night owls, which probably also lends to the feeling of drowsiness.
Cristina Garcia, PhD, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona and owner of the Center for Sleep and Psychological Wellness, LLC, agrees with this. She says that setting multiple alarms can cause us to feel more sleep inertia, which will make the whole waking-up process harder emotionally and mentally.
"Assuming you don't fall back to sleep between each alarm, then what you're doing is teaching yourself to ignore your alarms and instead hang out in bed awake. This is a no-no from a sleep hygiene perspective and probably from a family/job/school/productivity perspective, too," Garcia told BI.