People who use alarm clocks to wake up are ‘chronically tired’, study suggests

Hitting the snooze button in the morning may indicate a person is “chronically tired”, a new study has suggested.

Researchers said that people who use an alarm to wake up in the mornings were more tired than those who woke up naturally.

The study, said to be the first scientific investigation into snoozing, found that 57 per cent of fully-employed adult white-collar workers in the US reach for the snooze button.

But using an alarm may result in people feeling more groggy compared to waking up naturally because it disrupts that natural sleep cycle, scientists from the University of Notre Dame in the US said.

In contrast, people who woke up naturally without an alarm slept longer and drank less caffeine in the day.

Whether they snoozed after waking or not, they got the same amount of sleep. Those who did snooze without an alarm weren’t taking more naps in the day, and didn’t report feeling tired in the day more frequently.

The researchers said that when we wake naturally, the body experiences a stress response just before we rise to make us feel alert. Different hormones that circulate the body in deep sleep and just before we wake up also affect this.

But having an alarm to wake up can bypass the natural stress response that makes people alert, leading to an interrupted sleep cycle.

The team discovered that night owls hit snooze the most and were the most tired.

Dr Stephen Mattingly, lead author of the study, said: “Most of what we know about snoozing is taken from data on sleep, stress or related behaviours. Alarm clocks, smartphones, they all have snooze buttons.

“The medical establishment is generally against the use of snoozing, but when we went to look at what hard data existed, there was none.

“We now have the data to prove just how common it is — and there is still so much that we do not know. So many people are snoozing because so many people are chronically tired.

“If only one in three people are sleeping adequately, that means a lot of us are turning to other means to manage fatigue.”

The study surveyed 450 adults in full-time employment and collected data from wearable devices to measure sleep duration and heart rate.

They found that women were 50 per cent more likely to snooze than men, but those who hit snooze experience more disturbances during sleeping hours.

“These are people who have been in the workforce for years, white-collar workers with advanced degrees — and 57 per cent of them are snoozing,” Dr Mattingly said.

“Critically, these statistics are only representative of a small population that is likely to be in the best position with respect to sleep habits.”

He admitted: “We have no idea about various age groups such as teenagers, lower-income households or any of the populations that are historically more sleep deprived than the respondents of this study.

“So, the odds are this is probably a conservative estimate of the wider population."

However, writing in the journal Sleep, Professor Aaron Striegel, professor of computer science and engineering at Notre Dame, said snoozing did not indicate a problem, but needing an alarm because someone is sleep-deprived did.

He said: “Part of the focus of this study was to demystify what is happening with snoozing.

“Is it really worse than waking up to an alarm on the first ring — is it that much different?

“The recommendation against an alarm is well-founded, but as far as we can tell from the physiology and our data, waking to one alarm or hitting the snooze button and waking to two or three alarms doesn’t make much of a difference.

“If you need an alarm because you’re sleep-deprived — that’s the issue.”

Additional reporting by SWNS