Hitting Snooze on Your Morning Alarm Is More Harmful Than You Know

You snooze, you lose, or at least that’s what we have always been lead to believe. As most of us juggle our hectic work hard, party harder modern lifestyles, the one thing that we tend to sacrifice first is our sleep. Whether it’s because of binging on that one extra episode of Netflix, or just staying out later then normal, we always try and squeeze the most out of our day, leading to later nights and a struggle to wake up in the morning. 

 

Let us take you through a familiar scenario; your morning alarm rings, and the first thing you do is hit snooze and go back to sleep. (FYI, we confess to have done this up to four to five times on a particularity difficult morning.) In fact, some of us even preempt this behaviour and set an earlier alarm, just so that we can sneak in a little bit of snooze time. The logic that we use to justify this, is that the extra 15-20 min of sleep that we have managed to sneak in will help us feel rested and refreshed as we finally wake up and rush to get started on our busy lives. Some of us even consider snoozing a sacred part of our morning wake up routines. Well, wake up and smell the coffee (literally) hon, cuz pressing snooze on your phone can be doing wayyyyy more damage to your physical and mental health then you realise.

 

The physical aspect of it 

 

 

Let us first examine what happens to your body when you wake up and dive back into sleep repeatedly. According to research in the Journal of  Industrial Health, when we are artificially wrenched from sleep by an alarm clock, a burst of activity from the fight-or-flight branch of the nervous system causes a spike in blood pressure and a shock acceleration in heart rate. But, an even greater danger lurks within the alarm clock: the snooze button. If alarming your heart, quite literally, were not bad enough, using the snooze feature means you will repeatedly inflict that cardiovascular assault again and again within a short span of time. Repeating this at least five days a week in your working life, can cause multiple instances of abuse to your heart and nervous system. Do away with the snooze function and get in the habit of waking up once to spare your heart the repeated shock.

The mental repercussions

Now, let’s look at how hitting snooze can have an adverse aspect on your mental health. For this, we need to take a look at how sleep cycles function in a body. According to Google, A sleep cycle is the progression through the various stages of  non-REM sleep to REM sleep(deep sleep) before beginning the progression again with non-REM sleep. Typically, a person would begin a sleep cycle every 90-120 minutes resulting in four to five cycles on an average night of sleep. The gist of it? As you press snooze, your body enters another sleep cycle, and then you wake up in the middle of deep sleep instead of the lighter end of your sleep cycle, leading to a groggy, disoriented and cranky feeling that can sometimes last up to four hours. You end up struggling through the first half of your day, even as you rush to make-up for the time you wasted, and spend the first few hours of your morning tired and unhappy, craving your morning caffeine fix like an addict. Moreover, repeatedly going through this morning struggle can lead to anxiety and even depressive tendencies. 

 

What to do about it 

 

One thing has been clearly established; hitting snooze is not your friend. So, now that the time has come for us to try and kick the habit, here are a few tips that we can follow.

1. Appreciate waking up. 
2. Set an alarm you're happy to wake up to.
3. Have something to do / a reason you are getting up. 
4. Set a short goal. 
5. Go to bed earlier. 
6. Don't sleep too comfortably. 
7. Try to wake up in the right cycle. 
8. Put the alarm on the other side of the room.
9. Have some natural light in your bedroom.
10. If you do end up pressing snooze, go take a cold shower to snap you out of the groggy inertia immediately. Sleep experts say it is the only thing that works.

Our verdict? We have done away with hitting the snooze button ever since we realised how it was affecting us, and are having happier and much more energetic mornings. Why don't you try it out for yourself and see  how you feel? Happy non-snoozing, everyone!