How to stop hitting snooze (without hating your mornings)
Is snoozing actually bad for you? What the research says, why it's so hard to stop, and a few practical ways to break the snooze habit that don't rely on willpower.
Snooze gives you nine more minutes. For a lot of us, it somehow turns into forty-five.
Snoozing is one of those habits almost everyone has and almost nobody is proud of. So before we get into how to stop, it’s worth asking a slightly awkward question: is it actually that bad?
What the research says
Less bad than you’ve probably been told.
In 2023, researchers in Sweden published a study in the Journal of Sleep Research brilliantly titled “Is snoozing losing?”. They looked at habitual snoozers and found that 30 minutes of snoozing didn’t seem to hurt their mood, sleepiness or overnight sleep. On a thinking test taken straight after waking, the snoozers did about as well as on mornings they didn’t snooze, and sometimes slightly better.
A 2022 study from the University of Notre Dame came to a similar conclusion: people who snoozed didn’t sleep less overall, and didn’t report feeling more tired during the day than people who got up with the first alarm.
There are a couple of catches. The Swedish study was small (around 30 people for the thinking tests), and everyone in it was already a regular snoozer. And snoozing does cost you real sleep: the researchers estimated about six minutes of lost sleep for every half hour spent snoozing. That’s half an hour in bed, and only part of it asleep.
So if snoozing works for you, you don’t need to feel guilty about it. But if you’re snoozing because you can’t get up, and it’s making you late or leaving you foggy or just annoying you, it’s worth changing.
Why it’s so hard to stop
Two reasons, mostly.
The first is sleep inertia: the groggy state right after waking, when your brain is still partly asleep. It’s the worst possible moment to make a good decision, and it’s exactly when the snooze button asks you to make one.
The second is that snoozing is a habit, and habits don’t care about your plans. Same time, same button, same tiny reward of five more minutes in a warm bed. Repeat that a few hundred times and your thumb knows what to do before you do.
Which is why “just get up” doesn’t work. You’re asking the sleepiest version of yourself to overrule a well-worn habit, every single day.
What actually helps
The trick is to make the decision before you’re asleep, and make it hard to undo.
Set the alarm for when you actually need to get up. If you always snooze for 20 minutes, set the alarm 20 minutes later and get that time as real, unbroken sleep instead.
Turn snooze off. On the iPhone Clock app it’s a toggle on each alarm. It sounds harsh, but it removes the decision entirely. There’s no “five more minutes” option to talk yourself into.
Put some distance between you and the off switch. The classic version is putting your phone across the room. It works because by the time you’ve walked over, you’re more awake than you were in bed. The catch is that some of us walk back.
Give yourself a reason to be up. This sounds soft, but it’s surprisingly effective. Coffee you’re looking forward to, ten minutes of something you enjoy before anyone else is awake, the first episode of a podcast. Anything that’s better than the bed.
Keep your wake-up time consistent. Your body gets better at waking up at a time it can predict, and that includes weekends. Getting up tends to be much easier when your alarm isn’t a surprise.
Make the alarm do the work
The most reliable approach I’ve found is an alarm that won’t turn off until you’re properly awake. That’s the idea behind wake-up missions: instead of a snooze button, you get a small task, like a math problem, a puzzle, or finding something in another room. By the time you’ve solved it, the sleep inertia has mostly worn off, and going back to bed feels a lot less appealing.
It’s also why I built SproutAwake the way I did. You complete a wake-up mission to stop the alarm, you earn points and build a streak for every morning you don’t snooze, and 50% of proceeds go to One Tree Planted. A streak is a small thing, but it turns “don’t snooze” from a rule into something you’re quietly proud of. (Streaks have their downsides too. I wrote about that in why streaks don’t work.)
If your alarm volume is part of the problem, start with these iPhone settings. And if you want to compare alarm apps, here’s my honest roundup.
Either way: nine minutes is fine. Forty-five is a habit. Habits can be changed.