22/05/2025
💤Are you someone who pushes the snooze button in the morning? 🤔
The usual advice is to avoid using a snooze alarm in the morning. It is thought that people get more sleep and reduce feeling groggy on waking if they get up when their alarm first goes off.
However, there is little research on the use of snooze alarms. The research that does exist suggests their use is common. It has been estimated that 30-60% of people use a snooze alarm and typically push snooze more than once. People who naturally sleep later tend to use a snooze alarm more than people who naturally go to bed and wake earlier.
A recent study by Rebecca Robbins and colleagues investigated the use of snooze alarms in 21,222 users of a sleep tracking app over more than 3 million nights. They found:
1️⃣ Snooze button use is quite common. More than half of all sleep sessions ended with the push of the snooze button.
2️⃣ Almost half of the app users used a snooze alarm on most days (at least 80% of the time), and about a third pushed the snooze button 40-60% of the time.
3️⃣ On average, people who used snooze alarms on most days pushed the snooze button 4 times and snoozed for about 20 minutes. Those who used the snooze button on fewer days tended to push it fewer times and snooze for shorter periods.
4️⃣ Snoozing was less common on the weekend than on weekdays.
5️⃣ Snoozing was more common in longer sleepers and those who went to bed later.
So, why might people push the snooze button?
👉 Some people may not be getting enough, good quality sleep at regular times. Feeling unrested when waking up might increase the desire to push the snooze button.
👉 Feeling groggy on waking means it can be harder to bounce out of bed. It is possible that people use a snooze alarm to help with the wake-up process.
👉 Some people naturally have later bedtimes than others. These people fall asleep later and naturally wake up later than the average person. When required to wake at times required to get to work or school, they can feel groggy and unrested on waking. They may push the snooze button because they don’t feel they have had enough sleep.
👉 Shift workers are more likely to have short sleep and feel less rested when they wake up because they are sleeping at times when they are designed to be awake. Feeling unrested when waking up may lead to a desire for more sleep and pushing the snooze button.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions on snooze button use. There is an opportunity to learn more about the reasons people push a snooze button and how that links to their sleep behaviours and overall sleep health. From there, tailored guidance on snooze button use can be developed. While general guidelines exist for good sleep, many strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Snooze button use might signal that sleep support is needed, or instead, may have a sleep-supporting role we have not yet identified.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-99563-y
Snooze alarm use is a common, but poorly understood human behavior. We explore the prevalence and characteristics of snooze alarm use in more than 3 million nights collected in a global sample of users of a sleep monitoring smartphone application. On the nights that participants logged a sleep....
