Does hitting the snooze button help? - Big Questions - (Ep. 34)

Hi, I'm Craig. Hang on, I'm gonna hit the snooze button

And this is Mental Floss on YouTube. Today I'm gonna answer Mitra Mirpour's big question

does hitting the snooze button and getting those few extra minutes of sleep actually help

Well, it didn't help me, I'm still tired. You've probably seen a ton of articles about how the snooze button is terrible and makes

us even more tired, but as usual, things are a little more complicated than that. Let's

get started. A lot of sleep experts, or Slexperts, are anti-snooze button

Most of them will recommend setting an alarm for the actual time that you'll wake up, as opposed to giving yourself time to hit the snooze button in the morning

That way you won't risk the grogginess that usually comes after hitting snooze. But surprisingly, there haven't been many scientific studies on the effects of hitting the snooze button

So, there's no definite conclusion yet. That means we're done, right? See ya

Some believe that it might make you more tired for a couple reasons

Like we know that neurotransmitters are connected to sleep cycles. When we fall asleep, a lot of serotonin is released into our bloodstream, which is why

sleep is so enjoyable. But when we're about ready to wake up after 7-9 hours, or in my case 17 hours, the body

starts to release more dopamine into the bloodstream, preparing us to wake up. If you wake up suddenly then go back to sleep this cycle gets messed up and it might be even harder to wake up after that There are potentially more serious side effects to the snooze button too like one study done at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 found a connection between hitting the snooze

button in the morning and health problems, like weight gain and heart disease. According to Dr. David Dingus, who conducted this study, when we use the snooze button

we are in effect constantly disrupting the final 10, 20, or 30 minutes of sleep, as opposed

to just setting your clock another half hour later. But there's a flip side to this. Sleep fragmentation expert Dr. Edward Stepansky has claimed that hitting the snooze button

isn't so bad, especially for people who've already gotten eight hours of sleep. And in

general, some people just handle it better than others. Just, you know, people are different

We can all get along though. Let's be honest though, hitting the snooze button isn't always a conscious choice. Sometimes

we do it without realizing it, and there's a reason for that. When we wake up sooner than we'd like, sometimes we experience what's known as sleep inertia, or slanertia. This

is morning grogginess that's impacted by how suddenly we've been awoken. It takes a while for the prefrontal cortex to wake up in the morning with us. And that's the part of the

brain connected to decision making. So if you've been hitting the snooze button more than you'd like, just blame it on sleep inertia. Your boss probably won't accept that as an excuse