All articles

Does hitting snooze make you more tired?

Last updated: October 15, 2026

Not in the lab: a 2024 study found 30 minutes of snoozing did not change morning sleepiness or mood. But people who snooze report more morning drowsiness and shorter sleep, so frequent snoozing can be a sign you are short on sleep, although a 2022 study using wearables found snoozers slept as long as non-snoozers.

What the lab found

In Sundelin et al. (2024), 31 habitual snoozers slept in a lab twice: once snoozing for 30 minutes, once getting up at once. Snoozing cost about 6 minutes of sleep, kept them from being woken out of deep sleep, and made no clear difference to sleepiness or mood; test scores were the same or slightly better. So snoozing did not make them more tired, but it did not make them less tired either, and sleep inertia was not worse.

Why you may still feel tired

In the same paper, a survey of 1,732 people found that snoozers more often reported morning drowsiness and shorter sleep. A 2022 study of 450 adults with wearables, though, found that snoozers did not sleep less or feel sleepier than non-snoozers (Mattingly et al., 2022). Feeling wrecked in the morning can come from too little sleep, or from waking out of deep sleep: waking from N3 produces more inertia than lighter stages (Tassi & Muzet, 2000).

Cut the loop

If you want to actually feel more awake in the morning, fix sleep duration (7–9 hours per the NSF) and switch to a single-alarm wake routine with a forced task.

Sources

1. Sundelin et al., Journal of Sleep Research, 2024. Is snoozing losing? Why intermittent morning alarms are used and how they affect sleep, cognition, cortisol, and mood
2. Hirshkowitz et al., Sleep Health, 2015. National Sleep Foundation's sleep time duration recommendations
3. Tassi & Muzet, Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2000. Sleep inertia
4. Mattingly et al., SLEEP, 2022. Snoozing: an examination of a common method of waking