Waking up is a struggle, especially when you have to get up early for something like work or school. Many students are still tired when their alarm goes off in the morning, which leads to many of them using the snooze button. What they may not know is that hitting snooze may do more harm than good.

Standard alarm clocks, as well as the alarms on many smart phones, have a snooze button that lasts nine minutes before going off again. The length of this break is something that confuses many people. 

The reason the snooze button only lasts nine minutes is actually because of how they are made. Originally, analogue clocks were made of a bunch of different gears. Engineers could either make the break a little over ten minutes or a little over nine minutes. They feared that if they chose the ten minute option that people would go into deep sleep in that extra minute, making it harder to wake up. So, they chose the nine minute option.

But, even if you don’t go back into deep sleep, is a nine minute snooze good for you? The answer is actually no. Closing your eyes for those extra few minutes makes you much more drowsy than if you were to just get out of your bed. On top of that, when you hit snooze everyday, your body stops considering the alarm a wake up call since you never get up when it goes off.

Many students wish for the snooze length to be changed, but it is nearly a tie between people wanting a shorter time and people wanting a longer time.

“Snooze time should be shorter so that people are encouraged to actually get up. Don’t remove it, because people will just fall back asleep. But if we shorten it to like two minutes, people will wake up sooner,” Nicholas Swaringam (‘21) said.

Instead of hitting snooze, you should get up when your alarm first goes off, even if it is hard to do. A solution for this is to set your alarm for a later time, or put your alarm clock on the other side of the room so that you have to get up to turn it off. It’s especially helpful if you place it near your light switch so when you turn off the alarm, you can turn on the lights.