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Why is hitting the snooze button bad for you?

Last updated: October 15, 2026

Mostly because it costs you sleep and time, and it easily becomes a daily habit. In a 2024 lab study, 30 minutes of snoozing cost about 6 minutes of sleep but did not clearly harm test scores, mood or sleepiness. Snoozers do report more morning drowsiness and shorter sleep.

The lost-sleep problem

When your alarm rings and you snooze, you fall back into light, broken sleep. Sundelin and colleagues (Journal of Sleep Research, 2024) tested 31 habitual snoozers in a sleep lab: compared with getting up at once, 30 minutes of snoozing cost them about 6 minutes of sleep. Snoozing also kept them from being woken out of deep (N3) sleep, and their test scores on rising were the same or slightly better, so the authors suggest a short snooze may even ease grogginess for some people. The cost is real but modest: time and sleep you could have had in one unbroken block.

To make this concrete: a 30-minute snooze routine is half an hour spent in light, interrupted sleep, and in the lab it meant about 6 minutes less sleep than an abrupt wake-up. If you need that half hour, you are usually better off setting the alarm for the later time and sleeping through.

What about grogginess?

It is often claimed that snoozing makes sleep inertia worse. The lab evidence does not support that: in Sundelin et al. (2024), 30 minutes of snoozing did not worsen cognitive performance, sleepiness or mood on rising. Full alertness takes 20 to 30 minutes after waking (Balkin et al., 2002); snoozing mainly spends part of your morning in broken sleep, interrupted by the alarm every few minutes.

In a survey of 1,732 people in the same paper, snoozers more often reported morning drowsiness and shorter sleep. A 2022 University of Notre Dame study of 450 working adults found that snoozers slept as long as non-snoozers but had more disturbed sleep and lighter sleep before waking (Mattingly et al., 2022). Whether snoozing causes any of this, or simply goes with it, is not known.

The habit reinforces avoidance

Every snooze press is a small reward for delaying discomfort, and for many people it becomes a daily ritual. A 2025 analysis of more than 3 million nights from over 21,000 Sleep Cycle users found that about 56 percent of sleep sessions ended with a snooze, and more than a quarter of users (5,855 of 21,222) hit snooze on more than 80 percent of the nights they logged (Robbins et al., 2025). In the Notre Dame study, 57 percent of participants were habitual snoozers.

Behavioral economists call this present bias: given a button that postpones discomfort, the half-asleep brain tends to take it, whatever the fully-awake brain decided the night before. The decision-maker at 6am is not the same person who set the alarm at 11pm.

The time penalty

On mornings that end with a snooze, people pressed it 2.4 times and snoozed for about 11 minutes on average; on the mornings they snoozed, heavy snoozers averaged about 20 minutes (Robbins et al., 2025). Twenty minutes on 80 percent of mornings adds up to nearly 100 hours a year spent in light, broken sleep instead of either real sleep or your morning.

What we know about long-term effects

Not much yet. The studies above describe who snoozes and what happens on the morning itself. Whether years of snoozing affect health, mood or productivity has not been established.

What to do instead

Three practical steps:

1. Anchor the wake time, every day, including weekends. The CDC recommends going to bed and getting up at the same time every day.
2. Put your alarm out of arm's reach. Friction reduces snoozing without any willpower investment.
3. Replace the snooze with a wake-up mission. Detailed write-up here. ByeBed has no snooze button: you complete a math problem, do push-ups or photograph an object, and the alarm comes back, up to 10 times over 15 minutes, until you do.

"But I feel like I need it"

Often that feeling is sleep inertia, which fades on its own: without major sleep loss it rarely lasts more than 30 minutes (Tassi & Muzet, 2000). Getting up and moving through that window is usually easier than it feels in the first minute.

If you genuinely feel exhausted every morning despite 7+ hours in bed, the issue is not the alarm. You may need more sleep, or better sleep, and the next step is a sleep evaluation, not a better snooze strategy.

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. Mattingly et al., SLEEP, 2022 (University of Notre Dame). Snoozing: an examination of a common method of waking (450 adults)
3. Robbins et al., Scientific Reports, 2025. Snooze alarm use in a global population of smartphone users
4. Balkin et al., Brain, 2002. The process of awakening: a PET study of regional brain activity patterns mediating the re-establishment of alertness and consciousness
5. Tassi & Muzet, Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2000. Sleep inertia
6. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC — Sleep and Sleep Disorders