You set the alarm with good intentions. But when it goes off, your hand slaps the snooze button before your brain even registers what's happening. Nine minutes later, again. And again. By the time you actually get up, you've fragmented your last hour of sleep and you feel worse than if you'd just gotten up the first time.
When you hit snooze and fall back asleep, your brain starts a new sleep cycle it can't finish. Nine minutes later, the alarm pulls you out of the beginning of a cycle, causing severe sleep inertia (grogginess). Each snooze cycle makes the inertia worse. A study in Sleep found that fragmented sleep in the last hour before waking causes more impairment than simply getting up 30 minutes earlier.
Put your phone or alarm clock on the other side of the room. You have to physically get out of bed to turn it off. Once you're up, you're far less likely to crawl back in.
Alarms that start quiet and gradually increase in volume wake you more gently, reducing the panic response that makes you want to hide under the covers. Apps like Sleep Cycle or Alarmy can do this.
Multiple alarms train your brain that the first alarm doesn't matter. If you know you have 4 more alarms coming, you'll never take the first one seriously. Set ONE alarm and commit to getting up when it goes off.
If the first thing you do after waking is something unpleasant (commuting, work), of course you want to stay in bed. Make the first 10 minutes enjoyable: a cup of coffee you love, a podcast, a quick walk outside, or 5 minutes of music.
If you're hitting snooze repeatedly, you're probably not getting enough sleep. The fix isn't a better alarm, it's going to bed earlier. Move your bedtime 15 minutes earlier each week until you wake up naturally before your alarm.
A sunrise alarm clock that gradually brightens your room 30 minutes before your alarm mimics natural sunrise and makes waking up easier. Light suppresses melatonin and triggers cortisol production, both of which help you wake up.
Set your alarm based on your sleep cycles with our free Sleep Calculator. Waking up between cycles makes snoozing less tempting.
No. Nine minutes isn't enough to complete a sleep cycle or provide meaningful rest. It's just enough to start a new cycle and get pulled out of it, making you groggier.
It's a holdover from mechanical alarm clocks. The gear mechanism couldn't be set to exactly 10 minutes, so 9 minutes became the standard. Modern phones kept the convention.
You're probably sleep-deprived. If you need 5 snoozes to get up, you need to go to bed 30-45 minutes earlier. The body knows when it's had enough sleep, and if waking up is this hard, it hasn't.
Alarmy forces you to complete a task (take a photo, solve a math problem, scan a barcode) to turn off the alarm. It's effective because it engages your brain enough to wake you up fully. The barcode mode (scan a barcode in your bathroom) is especially good because it gets you out of bed.