The Sleep Charity: How to stop snoozing your alarm

If hitting the snooze button several times is part of your morning wake up routine, now’s the time to stop. The consequence can be feeling even more tired or groggy than if you’d just woken from the first alarm.

If you press the snooze button, your brain knows it’ll go off again – it’s already in the waking up process – and you won’t get any of the deep, resting slumber in between snoozes. In fact, every time the alarm goes off you get an increase in cortisol which causes you to wake abruptly and send your body into ‘fight or flight’ response.

The short period of sleep you get in between hitting the snooze button is not restorative and is disrupting your sleep pattern. It’s much better to have the extra 10-30 minutes of sleep than repeatedly pressing snooze.

Deep sleep (or slow wave sleep) is the most restorative sleep state and it is necessary for your body to repair itself and recharge for the next day. Deep sleep happens in the third stage of sleep and it is where heart rate and breathing slows and your muscles relax. You often feel disorientated if you’re woken from this stage of sleep.

Are you a serial snoozer? 

So, how should we set our alarms?

Set your alarm for when you definitely have to get up and try to coincide it going off with when you’re coming out of your sleep cycle. If you have a hard time not pressing the snooze button, try putting it across the room so you have to walk over there, waking you up along the way.

The grogginess we feel moments after waking up is called sleep inertia – and is a state we are in between sleep and wakefulness.

Even if you slept enough hours, there are a number of reasons why you can feel groggy in a morning – it’s too dark, it’s too cosy in bed or you’ve been rudely woken mid sleep cycle!

There’s no doubt about it, as the nights draw in and temperatures drop, people spend more time in their beds than they do in better weather. It’s human nature to want to sleep in when it’s cold outside. Waking up is hard to do – especially when it’s still dark and cold outside.

Sleep hygiene habits

The quality of sleep you get is as important as is the quantity so it’s important to ensure you practise good sleep hygiene habits to set you up for jumping out of bed in a morning.

1. If you’re struggling to get out of bed, you could use light therapy or sunshine alarm clocks that help to wake you with light. But don’t be too hard on yourself either. Beds are places where far more than just sleep happens and the overall experience of staying in bed longer and resting contributes to our health and wellbeing. It serves as a restorative function both physiologically and mentally.
2. With the winter months, comes colder weather. It can be hard to get out of bed when it’s chilly underfoot. Set the heating to come on 30-60 minutes before you are due to get up.
3. Exposure to light in a morning is important. Get those curtains or blinds open first thing and if you can, try to get outdoors for a morning walk. Natural light, which can still be effective on a cloudy or grey day, helps reset the internal body clock. It helps us get over feeling groggy when we have just woken up and makes us more alert.
4. Having a morning shower – or splashing your face with water – will also help to awaken you, as can going for a brisk morning walk or some gentle stretching. Factor in a fatigue-busting breakfast – something like low sugar cereal, yoghurt, nuts, wholegrains or lean proteins – which will set you up for the day.

About The Sleep Charity: The Sleep Charity, incorporating The Sleep Council, provides advice and support to empower the nation to sleep better. We campaign to improve sleep support and access to high quality information, raise awareness of the value of a good night’s sleep and promote understanding around the complexities of sleep. We want everyone to share our vision that sleep is a vital component of health and wellbeing and that everyone living with sleep issues should have access to effective, consistent, evidence-based support.