The bed is warm. The room is still dark. The alarm goes off, and your hand finds your phone before your eyes open, because of course it does. Ten more minutes. You pull the covers up, turn over, and for a few seconds everything is perfect again.
Then, somewhere in the drift back down, the thought shows up. You said you were going to get up early today. You set this alarm with good intentions, and here you are, burrowing deeper into the pillow instead of standing in the kitchen making coffee.
It’s six-fifteen. You could still make it work. But the warmth is right there and the day hasn’t started pulling at you yet, and some part of you knows that the next time you open your eyes it’ll be six-thirty and the math won’t work anymore.
The word people reach for is discipline. You don’t have enough of it. You’re soft, or lazy, or you’re not the kind of person who hears an alarm and throws the covers back, ready to take on the day.
The assumption underneath all of it is that hitting snooze is bad for you. That it wrecks your sleep, leaves you groggier, and trains your body to give up before the day starts.
That assumption was never tested until a few years ago. When someone finally tested it, the answer came back different.
Until recently, nobody had tested what snoozing does
Tina Sundelin, a sleep researcher at Stockholm University, was the first person to measure what snoozing does to your sleep. Not fragmented sleep in general, which has been researched for decades, but the specific thing you do every morning when you tap a button and go back under for ten minutes. Nobody had looked at it.
Her team surveyed over 1,700 people and found that seven in ten snooze at least sometimes. Then they brought thirty-one habitual snoozers into a sleep lab and compared two mornings: one where the alarm went off once, and one where it went off thirty minutes early, and they could hit snooze.
Snoozing cost about six minutes of total sleep. That was it. No extra grogginess. No mood change. Cortisol, the hormone your body releases to pull itself awake every morning, came in the same.
Your body starts ramping up cortisol on its own in the hour before you wake. The worry was that snoozing would disrupt that ramp. It didn’t.
On cognitive tests measuring processing speed, memory, and basic math, the snoozers performed the same or better than they did on the cold-wake morning. That edge held for about forty minutes, which is roughly the length of a whole morning routine.
The shower, the coffee, getting out the door. They were sharper through all of it. Not by a dramatic margin, but enough that the researchers noted it: the snooze group didn’t pay a penalty. They got a small head start.
Your brain isn’t wasting those ten minutes
Some mornings you open your eyes, and you’re just awake. Other mornings the alarm pulls you out of something heavy, and for the next twenty minutes you can’t hold a thought together.
Sleep researchers call that fog sleep inertia. It happens when the alarm catches you far from the surface, deep in the kind of sleep your body doesn’t want to leave.
What snoozing appears to do is keep you from sinking that far in the last stretch of the night. Each time the alarm goes off, and you drift back down, you don’t go all the way under. You stay close to the top.
Sundelin thinks the repeated alarms work as a tether, catching you before you drop too deep. By the time the last one goes off, your brain has already started waking up on its own.
You probably recognize this even if you’ve never thought about it. The minutes between alarms don’t feel like real sleep. They’re closer to drifting, half-aware of the room, the light changing, the fact that it’s almost time.
The alarm didn’t do the work. The ten minutes did.
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If you’re snoozing for an hour, that’s not this
This comes with caveats. The study looked at habitual snoozers who hit the button a few times over twenty to thirty minutes and were otherwise getting a full night of sleep. If that sounds like your morning, the research is on your side.
If you’re hitting the button six or seven times, losing track of how long you’ve been at it, or sleeping through the alarm entirely, that points to a sleep debt. The fix is earlier bedtimes, not more alarms.
The research is also early on this: Thirty-one people, one night in the lab, all practiced snoozers. A 2022 study from Hiroshima University found the opposite: snooze alarms may prolong grogginess rather than shorten it. Neither study is the last word.
Sundelin put it the way scientists do when they’ve found something but want more evidence before they commit. Snoozing for a limited time in the morning is “probably not bad for you,” she said. The guilt, it turns out, was running ahead of the evidence.
So go ahead and hit snooze
Tomorrow morning, when the alarm goes off and your hand moves before your brain does, let it. Those ten minutes under the covers are not a character flaw. Your brain may be doing something useful in there, shifting out of the deep stage at its own pace instead of being dragged out by a sound it didn’t ask for.
The people who pop up on the first alarm aren’t more disciplined than you. They may be waking from a lighter stage to begin with, which is timing, not virtue. You got the same amount of sleep. You just took a different route to being awake.
