Sleep expert explains why some people need multiple alarms to wake up

For many people, the snooze alarm is a vital part of the morning. Once, twice or more, it delays the inevitable start to the day. According to sleep experts, however, it may be more accurate to call that button an enemy.

“It’s satisfying in the moment to hit the snooze and delay getting out of bed and starting the day, but it does actually fragment and undermine that sleep quality,” Dr. Brandon Peters, a neurologist and sleep medicine physician with Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, told CNN.

A 2022 study published in the journal Sleep, helmed by researchers at the University of Notre Dame, discovered around 57% of 450 participants habitually used the snooze button.

“These are people who have been in the workforce for years, white-collar workers with advanced degrees—and 57% of them are snoozing,” lead study author Stephen Mattingly said in a news release.

“Critically, these statistics are only representative of a small population that is likely to be in the best position with respect to sleep habits. We have no idea about various age groups such as teenagers, lower-income households or any of the populations that are historically more sleep deprived than the respondents of this study. So, the odds are this is probably a conservative estimate of the wider population.”

Michigan Medicine Sleep Disorders Center’s sleep medicine physician Dr. Cathy Goldstein told CNN that the most common reason someone repeatedly uses the snooze button is sleep deprivation. According to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 36% of Americans didn’t get enough sleep in 2022.

“Number one: are you actually getting the sleep you need?” Goldstein asked. “Not the amount of sleep you think you should get or that you want to get, but the amount of sleep that you actually need. And are you getting that on a nightly basis?”

For most adults, seven to nine hours of sleep will suffice, but every person has different requirements. Another reason a person may be hitting the snooze button is they are naturally predisposed to operating late in the night and sleeping through the early morning, a proverbial night owl forced to wake up because of an early work schedule.

Another possible cause of snoozing is sleep inertia, a disorder that hampers a person’s ability to transition out of sleep. For most, however, it’s just about needing to catch more Zs, the experts say.

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