2023-10-20 12:36:50
Snooze buttons are popular. Just pretend to get a little sleep. A quick press and the alarm clock is off. But it has had a bad reputation among sleep researchers. Maybe wrongly? At least that’s what one study suggests, the results of which are published in the journal „Journal of Sleep Research“ were published.
As a Swedish-led research group describes, it even seems to be an advantage not to jump out of bed at the first alarm, but to push the alarm clock away a few more times – but only for certain people.
Whether you let yourself be woken up by a classic alarm clock or a cell phone: For morning grouches, the snooze button or snooze function is a blessing, as it allows you to cancel the alarm signal and only let it sound again a few minutes later.
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But snoozing, as the change between waking up and going back to sleep is also called, has a bad reputation – the constant delay in getting up messes up the internal clock and the brain. The result is fatigue that lasts throughout the day with corresponding consequences for cognitive performance. In English it is also said “You snooze, you lose”, i.e. whoever snoozes loses.
A research group led by Tina Sundelin from Stockholm University conducted two studies to investigate whether the phrase is really justified. In the first, a good 1,700 people were asked about their morning habits – including whether they use the snooze function.
69 percent said they hit the snooze button at least sometimes, extending their time in bed by an average of 22 minutes. Specifically, the respondents named very different snooze times, from one minute to three hours.
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Young adults and night owls were particularly likely to report delaying getting up using the snooze button. The reason they gave was that they were too tired to get up when the alarm clock first went off.
For the second study, 31 people who regularly used the snooze function spent three nights in a sleep laboratory. During the stay, Sundelin and her team recorded various measurements of the participants’ sleep.
Every three nights, the test subjects were allowed to sleep as long as they usually do, with the first night serving to get used to the unfamiliar sleeping environment. Another morning they had to get up as soon as the alarm clock rang. In the third experimental arrangement, it went off half an hour earlier – but the participants were allowed to snooze for half an hour that morning, i.e. press the snooze button, which silenced the alarm clock for nine to ten minutes.
Snooze button increases cognitive performance
Contrary to the well-known criticism of snoozing, pressing the snooze button multiple times and switching between sleep and waking did not lead to a decline in cognitive performance. On the contrary: in three out of four tests, which included math and memory tasks, the participants performed better than on the morning when they got up as soon as the alarm clock first rang.
What is important in this context is that the participants in this second study were exclusively people who are used to waking up with a snooze phase. “These individuals may need more time to ward off the effects of sleep inertia,” the research group writes.
Given the cognitive improvements observed in Study 2, snoozing could be a possible way to achieve this. Although more evidence is needed to show improvement in cognitive function, it is at least clear that snoozing does not lead to cognitive impairment in people who are used to it.
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In addition, the researchers found that the test subjects no longer fell into a deep sleep on snooze mornings – being woken up during this phase is considered particularly unpleasant. In addition, no clear consequences were observed for stress hormone levels, morning fatigue, mood or the sequence of sleep phases during the night. However, hitting the snooze button resulted in an average of six minutes of lost sleep.
Sleep researcher Sundelin concludes in a statement from her university: “The results suggest that there is no reason to forego snoozing in the morning if you enjoy it, at least not for snooze times of around 30 minutes.” It could even be Help those who are sleepy in the morning feel a little more alert when they get up. Accordingly, the snooze function of the alarm clock should be viewed in a more differentiated manner in the future: for some people, namely those with a late chronotype and morning sleepiness, it could help to alleviate sleep inertia.
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