Is Snooze the Enemy?

When we hear the first sound of the alarm, our bodies release adrenaline and cortisol, hormones that wake us, interrupting our natural sleep cycle to make us alert.

Surrendering to the temptation of the snooze erases that hormonal surge: our bodies try to reenter the deeper periods of sleep. Only those restorative levels of sleep take a lot longer than nine minutes to enter, so every snooze confuses our bodies even more. We think three or four snoozes are the equivalent of an extra 30 or 40 minutes of rest, but the patchy, interrupted sleep of snooze is worse than no sleep at all. Instead of the natural sleeping then waking, the snooze drags us into unhealthy, unsatisfying fits of trying to sleep and trying to rise, but failing to do either.

-Casey N. Cep, professed snoozer, wrote about how the snooze button is messing with our sleep cycles and our days and our productivity and probably the very fabric of the cosmos over at Pacific Standard today. Are you a snoozer? I am a snoozer. I used to be a set-10-separate-alarms-er, but on the new iPhone interface you just tap the surface of the screen at first call and it shuts up for nine blissful minutes, and I am once again falling victim to The 9-Minute Snooze. My sleep issues are Tim Cook’s fault, is what I’m saying, not mine. [Pacific Standard]