The Devil Is in Your Snooze Button
Surrendering to the temptation of the snooze erases that hormonal surge: our bodies try to reenter the deeper periods of sleep. Only those restorative levels of sleep take a lot longer than nine minutes to enter, so every snooze confuses our bodies even more. We think three or four snoozes are the equivalent of an extra 30 or 40 minutes of rest, but the patchy, interrupted sleep of snooze is worse than no sleep at all. Instead of the natural sleeping then waking, the snooze drags us into unhealthy, unsatisfying fits of trying to sleep and trying to rise, but failing to do either.
I LIVED WITHOUT THE snooze for the first two decades of my life. It was only during a particularly sleep-deprived period of college that I gave in to the temptation of tapping that button three or four times every morning. Like any addiction, it’s hard to break. I go to bed contracting with my future self to rise the precise moment the alarm sounds, but morning after morning my future self cheats my past self with one snooze after another. Day by day, I rise groggier and drowsier, taking hours instead of minutes to actually, truly awaken.So how are we to resist the wiles of Mephistopheles? If the war on smoking was won partly by convincing smokers that every cigarette stole 11 minutes of their lives, then perhaps the war on snooze can be won by convincing sleepers they lose nine, 18, 27, even 36 minutes of their sleep lives every morning. We must realize that every snooze is not nine minutes gained, but hours lost: not only of productive sleep, but productive wakefulness.
