Should You Use the Snooze Button?

The snooze button is just one of life's little luxuries, and it's easy to kid yourself into thinking that all you need is an extra ten, twenty- or even thirty minutes to sleep. But if you're lying there snoozing, you're lying to yourself. At best, it's a psychological crutch. At worst, it's throwing off your brain function for the day. And it's defiantly not helping you get any real rest. You must be wondering, "what do you mean i'm not getting any real rest?" To explain, when you let yourself go back to sleep after hitting the snooze button, your body thinks, "false alarm! I guess we didn't need to do anything, because we're not getting up after all," and settles back into sleep mood. When that buzzer goes off a second time, your body and brain are taken by surprise, resulting in that groggy, fuzzy feeling called sleep inertia. The more you snooze, the more confused your body and brain get ("So are we going back to sleep or not?!"), so you'll probably feel even more out of it even though you actually spent "extra" time in bed.  Sleep inertia, first given the name in 1976, is just one of the many downfalls that the snooze button can have. Sleep inertia slows down your decision-making abilities, impairs your memory and hurts your general performance once you do get out of bed. To make matters worse, coffee and a cold shower can't make up for it it, it can take up to an hour and a half to shake off sleep-inertia grogginess. The snooze button can also contribute to "weight gain, diabetes and heart disease, a sleep scientist from the University of Pennsylvania has said." When you wake up naturally, as on a relaxed weekend morning, you do so based mainly on two factors: the amount of external light and the setting of our internal alarm clock, scientifically called circadian rhythm. You probably know that sleep occurs in cycles, the two most important cycles are rapid eye movement (REM) and deep sleep. We all experience more deep sleep early in the night, and more REM sleep before natural awakening, triggered by changing chemical balances. An hour or two before you wake up, you are most likely to be in REM sleep. You dream a lot during this period, and analysis recent memories. Research shows that cutting into REM sleep with an alarm can blunt your mental function during the day. Studies about sleep fragmentation convey sleep which is interrupted by a snooze button every minute or every ten can lead to "sleepiness-related daytime impairment." There is less value in snooze sleep and, if too much of your bed time is spent snoozing, you can expect impairments in your memory, reaction time, comprehension and attention.
So, should you use the snooze button? Probably not. What should you do if you wake up tired every morning? The best thing to do would be face the facts, that your not getting enough sleep, and no amount of snoozing will not fix that.  Some long term fixes would be sleep earlier, and have your alarm out of reach. You could also get a Clocky- just watch the video below.

I chose this article because I felt that everyone can relate to having an alarm and pressing the snooze button for school. I, myself do it a lot. Doing research about this, has really made me understand the science behind how awful it is, and the cons to just pressing a single button. This article was fascinating because I love learning about how the body functions. The fact that it explained how we have two different sleep cycles, really intrigued me.

Article: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/snoozers-are-in-fact-losers