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Why do some people hit snooze?
For many people, hitting snooze is the result of not obtaining enough sleep the night before. Some people experience more severe sleep inertia and hit the snooze button due to underlying health issues, however. A study by researchers at the University of Notre Dame is painting a clearer picture of our tendency to hit the snooze button — and if you delayed getting out of bed this morning, you’re certainly not alone. The study, published in the journal SLEEP, found that 57 percent of the participants were habitual snoozers. The snooze button makes you feel more tired. Pretty much everyone feels groggy upon waking, courtesy of a physiological reaction called “sleep inertia.” Your brain and body are switching gears, and the result can be an overwhelming desire to go back to sleep. A little more than one third (35.57 percent) of women and 43.39 percent of men say they never hit snooze, with the rest admitting to hitting snooze at least once. As for chronic snoozers, 6.31 percent of women and 5.65 percent of men say they hit snooze more than three times. The extra 10 minutes you get by snoozing can actually help to gently awaken the mind, rather than jolt it back to wakefulness. Dinges says that if you aren’t letting yourself fall totally back asleep but instead are using that snooze time to gently awaken, that’s not so bad. Some sleep experts say you should keep your snooze period under 10 minutes, while others say 20 minutes is the optimal snooze period.
Why is snooze 5 minutes?
Alarm clocks did exist before the snooze function, so there was already a standard gear setup that innovators had to work with. Getting the gear teeth to line up to allow for exactly ten minutes wasn’t possible, so they had to choose between setting it at nine minutes and a few seconds or a little bit over ten minutes. “That was the mechanical limits of a mechanical clock.” Clockmakers had to decide if the snooze would be a little longer than ten minutes or a little less. Fearing more than ten minutes would allow the clock owner to slip back into a deep sleep (and risk being late), they picked nine minutes. As Apple Explained says, This was a problem, since they [alarm clock makers] couldn’t adjust the clock’s gear teeth to line up perfectly for a ten-minute snooze. This left them with a decision to have the snooze feature silence clocks for 10 minutes and 43 seconds or 9 minutes and 3 seconds. The French inventor Antoine Redier was the first to patent an adjustable mechanical alarm clock, in 1847. Lew Wallace came up with the the snooze button. Popular opinion has it that the snooze was the feat, or fault, of Lew Wallace, the famous author of Ben-Hur.
Why is snooze 9 minutes?
“That was the mechanical limits of a mechanical clock.” Clockmakers had to decide if the snooze would be a little longer than ten minutes or a little less. Fearing more than ten minutes would allow the clock owner to slip back into a deep sleep (and risk being late), they picked nine minutes. But because early reports indicated that 10 minutes was too long, allowing people to fall back into a deep sleep, clock makers decided on the nine-minute gear, believing people would wake up easier and happier after a shorter snooze. Each snooze session on an alarm clock is normally between 5 and 10 minutes long. Drifting in and out of sleep for those extra few minutes could have a negative effect on our physical health. When we snooze, we are disrupting the REM sleep — or dream sleep — which is a restorative sleep state. In a typical night, a person goes through four to six sleep cycles. See Full Reference . Not all sleep cycles are the same length, but on average they last about 90 minutes each.