Hitting the Snooze Button? You're Far From Alone
hubie writes:
Hitting the snooze button? You're far from alone, study shows:
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. While scientists and medical professionals have long advised against it, the act of snoozing - how often and why we do it - remains virtually unstudied.
"Most of what we know about snoozing is taken from data on sleep, stress or related behaviors," said Stephen Mattingly, lead author of the study who conducted the research while a postdoctoral researcher at Notre Dame, with Aaron Striegel, professor of computer science and engineering at Notre Dame. "Alarm clocks, smartphones, they all have snooze buttons. The medical establishment is generally against the use of snoozing, but when we went to look at what hard data existed, there was none. We now have the data to prove just how common it is - and there is still so much that we do not know."
[...] "So many people are snoozing because so many people are chronically tired," Mattingly said. "If 1 in 3 people aren't sleeping adequately, that means a lot of us are turning to other means to manage fatigue."
[...] The study also considered each respondent's chronotype, or when they prefer to go to bed and wake up. Night owls were found to snooze more and were found to be more tired in general. "In the 9 to 5 world," Mattingly said, "night owls are losing."
"Part of the focus of this study was to demystify what is happening with snoozing," Striegel said. "Is it really worse than waking up to an alarm on the first ring - is it that much different? The recommendation against an alarm is well-founded, but as far as we can tell from the physiology and our data, waking to one alarm or hitting the snooze button and waking to two or three alarms doesn't make much of a difference. If you need an alarm because you're sleep-deprived - that's the issue."
[...] Both Striegel and Mattingly say more research is needed to understand any potential negative health impacts of snoozing, and Mattingly emphasized that the best advice is for everyone to sleep as much as their body needs.
Journal Reference:
Stephen M Mattingly, Gonzalo Martinez, Jessica Young, et al. Snoozing: an examination of a common method of waking, Sleep, 45, 2022. (DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsac184)
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