How Hard Is It to Wake Up in the Morning?

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How Hard Is It to Wake Up in the Morning?

The alarm rings. Do you hide your head under the pillow and try your best to block out the blaring noise? Do you hit the snooze button over and over and drift back to sleep, if only for a few more minutes? Or do you jump out of bed, eager to greet the new day?

In “You Snooze, You … Win?,” Dani Blum reports on a new study suggesting that smashing your alarm button may not be all that bad. But sleep experts, she writes, say there may be even better ways to wake up:

Just how bad is it, really, to smash the snooze button when your alarm blares? What about doing it a second time, or a third?

New research out of Sweden suggests that it may not be as detrimental to your sleep as it seems, though some sleep experts still advise against it.

Across two studies, researchers set out to examine the effects of snoozing, or using intermittent alarms, to postpone finally dragging yourself out of bed. They started by surveying over 1,700 people about their sleep habits and found that nearly 70 percent of them routinely hit the snooze button. The subjects mostly did so because they felt too tired to wake up, though 17 percent said they snoozed because “it feels good.”

The researchers then had 31 habitual snoozers spend several nights in a sleep lab. On one morning, they were allowed to hit the snooze button every 10 minutes or so, for up to 30 extra minutes of rest. But on another morning, they had to get up right after their alarms went off.

Immediately after the participants woke up, the researchers flipped on the lights and presented them with math problems and other cognitive tests — a challenge even more grating than a shrieking alarm, and one the participants had to complete before having a cup of coffee.

Overall, participants performed slightly better on some of the cognition tests when they were allowed to snooze for 30 minutes, and their sleep quality wasn’t significantly worse because of the morning snoozing, said Tina Sundelin, a researcher at Stockholm University and the lead author of the studies.

If you tend to be very tired in the morning, “half-sleeping, or sleeping rather than being awake and not functioning, might actually be helpful to your final wake-up,” she said.

The article ends with some tips on better wake-up habits, especially for habitual snooze hitters:

Rather than setting and snoozing multiple alarms, a better way to haul yourself out of bed may be to put your phone or alarm across the room, said Dr. Indira Gurubhagavatula, a sleep specialist at Penn Medicine. Doing so can break the habit of relying on the snooze button and make it harder to slip back into sleep. Getting sunlight in the morning can also help.

If you’re able to repeatedly hit your snooze button in the first place, that means you have the luxury of time, Dr. Gurubhagavatula said; you don’t actually have to wake up for your first alarm. So you might as well just set your alarm for as late as you can, she said, and not lose the precious minutes of rest between interruptions.

Still, she acknowledged, that may not dissuade the lifelong snoozers.

“There’s science, and then there’s habit,” she said.

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

  • How hard is it to wake up in the morning? Describe a typical morning for you: Is it painful to awaken and drag yourself out of bed? Are you a snoozer who routinely hits the snooze button, delaying the inevitable as long as possible? Or do you pop out of bed easily, with or without an alarm?

  • How do you feel in the morning? Groggy? Cranky? Chipper? How ready are you to start the day? Does your morning wake-up routine affect the rest of your day, in and outside of school?

  • What is your reaction to studies suggesting that there might be benefits to hitting the snooze button? Does that ring true from your own experience? Have you noticed any difference in your cognitive function, like reaction times or short-term memory, when you snooze for a while versus jumping out of bed immediately?

  • What do you think of the article’s recommendations for improving morning wake-up routines? Will you try any? Overall, would you say you have good sleep habits? Do you think if you improved the way you sleep and wake up, you might be more productive during the day?