How Hitting “Snooze” Actually Steals Your Sleep

There’s a common myth that older people require less sleep; the reality is that sleeping less and not dying of it does not equate to needing less.

See also: Sleep: Yes, You Really Do Still Need It! and How Sleep-Deprived Are You, Really?

Quantity is not everything though; quality absolutely matters too: The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter) ← duration is just one dimension out of the six!

Harvard declares: you snooze, you lose

Dr. Rebecca Robbins et al. did a huge study using data from the SleepCycle smartphone app, analyzing over 3 million sleep sessions from 21,222 users across four continents—of which, most participants lived in the US (nearly half), followed by the UK, Japan, Germany, and Australia (then other countries; the distribution was simply a matter of where the app is popular, and was not part of the study design).

So, firstly, how much did people use the snooze button? 55.6% of sleep sessions involved a snooze alarm. 45% of users were heavy snoozers, 28% moderate, 27% light.

❝Overall, users pressed the snooze alarm approximately 2.4 times daily and spent on average 10.8 minutes snoozing.

This is equivalent to a monthly loss of nearly one 6-hour night of sleep.

Heavy users chose the snooze alarm approximately 4 times daily, resulting in about 20 minutes of snoozing duration. On the other hand, light users chose the snooze alarm on average 1.2 times a day, resulting in 3 minutes of snoozing duration.❞

~ Dr. Sanchari Sinha Dutta

About that average user’s loss of the equivalent of nearly a night of sleep per month: What Harm Can One Sleepless Night Do?

You may be wondering: how did adding an extra 10.8 minutes (or 20, or 3) on average result in lost sleep, rather than more?

It comes down to sleep cycles, of which the shortest healthy sleep cycle is 20 minutes. Anything shorter than that, and it’ll be a broken cycle, and you’ll (unless in cases of very extreme sleep deprivation) be better off not having taken that at all.

This same principle goes for napping, by the way, though there’s more to it than that, sufficient that we wrote a whole main feature about this: How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)

Consequently, the time spent hitting the snooze button and then not getting a full sleep cycle in, was for functional purposes in terms of brain health time lost.

Furthermore, the researchers noted that frequent snooze-button use was linked to erratic sleep patterns, short and poor-quality sleep, and resultant sleep problems such as hypersomnia / compensatory sleep behavior.

See also: How Regularity Of Sleep Can Be Even More Important Than Duration ← A recent, large (n=72,269) 8-year observational study of adults aged 40-79 found a strong association between irregular sleep and major cardiovascular events, to such an extent that it was worse than undersleeping.

Back to the Harvard study: the paper itself, which we’ll link below, has a lot of data, including a lot of demographic information we didn’t include her for brevity. For example,

❝In addition, we observed that women’s snooze duration was slightly longer than men. It is possible the gender difference observed in snooze alarm behavior stems from the increased risk for insomnia among women as compared to men²⁰. In addition, women shoulder a greater burden of childcare duties compared to men²¹, which may be on top of professional or other duties, therefore reducing the time available to women for sleep and increasing risk for sleep difficulties²², which may increase reliance upon snooze alarm.❞

Read the study paper in full: Snooze alarm use in a global population of smartphone users

What to do about this?

Well, “don’t use the snooze button” is a great start.

But also: Calculate (And Enjoy) The Perfect Night’s Sleep ← this is about getting all your sleep cycles right, not just the last one of the night!

And finally: Get Better Sleep: Beyond The Basics

Sweet dreams!