You snooze, you lose. Sleep experts have put out that message for years: If you use the snooze button repeatedly, (say, five times over an hour), you put yourself out of whack.

We usually set ourselves up for it. That is, we make the snooze button part of our plans – setting the clock ahead of when we need to get up – and this may result in being pulled out of deep restorative sleep.

It may mean being tired all day with cognitive abilities on a go-slow and the sleep at the end of this dizzy day will be scrambled.

As CNN recently reported:

“For the last hours of sleep, people usually go in and out of the fourth and last stage of the sleep cycle, known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

“This stage is particularly important for memory processing and creative thinking. Having that stage of sleep fragmented could impact that brain function.”

The net effect, according to this theory, is ‘fragmented sleep’. Which eventually has a poor impact on your health.

But is it really a thing?

There is an obvious logic to the idea. By setting the alarm an hour or so before we really need to get up, we are without doubt losing sleep, a precious commodity for most of us.

But to what extent has this theory been tested? Some experts now say there is little real evidence that people’s health and sleep habits are damaged by the snooze button.

Yes, snoozers are losing sleep, but it may not be as much or as problematic as widely believed.

A recent study in the Journal of Sleep Research found that “people who regularly pressed the snooze button lost only about six minutes of sleep per night – and it didn’t affect their morning sleepiness or mood”.

Also, according to a report in Scientific American, “tests showed that 30 minutes of snoozing improved or did not affect cognition compared with people who woke up the first time their alarm went off”.

This is supported by a 2022 study that found chronic snoozers generally felt no sleepier than people who don’t snooze.

“Snoozing for a limited time in the morning is probably not bad for you,” says the study’s lead author, Tina Sundelin, a sleep researcher at Stockholm University. She was talking to Scientific American.

Sundelin said her study “is one of few that have directly tested snoozing’s effect on sleep health, and it offers evidence that snoozing doesn’t break up sleep in a harmful way”.

Another theory

A 2022 study, as reported by Time, found that snoozing isn’t as disruptive as previously described. It did find, though, that snoozers “tend to experience lighter sleep, especially in the hour before waking, and had elevated resting heart rates relative to non-snoozers – results that suggest their stress responses kicked into gear before waking”.

That may sound like a bad thing, but the body has a stress system for a reason, the authors say.

In this context, he says, ‘‘it may help shake off sleep inertia’’, or the grogginess many people feel after waking, and promote alertness and cognitive function.

More research to come, no doubt.

In the meantime, if you’re a snoozer, why not try setting one alarm  at the time you really have to be out of bed. Give it a try for a week and see how you feel. Do it for science.