Is snoozing actually bad for you?

Probably not, and the internet has been lying to you about it. A 2023 study in the Journal of Sleep Research by Tina Sundelin and colleagues surveyed 1,732 adults and then put 31 habitual snoozers through a lab morning: thirty minutes of snoozing cost them about six minutes of sleep and produced no measurable cognitive impairment on tests taken right after waking. On a couple of tasks the snoozers actually did marginally better. Sundelin has since said publicly that the snooze button has been "unfairly villainized."

So why did we build an alarm with no snooze button in it at all? Because the case against snoozing was never really about your brain. It is about the fact that at 6:40am, you cannot be trusted.

What the 2023 study actually found

The study had two halves. The survey half found that snoozing is close to universal: 69% of respondents said they used the snooze button or multiple alarms at least sometimes, and the people who did it were disproportionately young and disproportionately evening types. Not lazy. Not broken. Just people whose bodies want to wake up later than their calendar does.

The lab half is the interesting one. Thirty-one habitual snoozers spent two mornings in a sleep lab: one where they snoozed for thirty minutes, one where they got up on the first alarm. Researchers measured sleep with polysomnography, then ran cognitive tests within minutes of waking. Snoozing cost around six minutes of total sleep. It did not degrade performance on arithmetic, memory or reaction-time tasks. It did not raise cortisol. Mood and sleepiness across the rest of the morning were the same.

The honest caveats, because they matter: thirty-one people is a small lab sample, they were all habitual snoozers, and the snooze period was capped at thirty minutes. The study tells you nothing reliable about the person who sets five alarms across ninety minutes. It also cannot tell you what snoozing does over years. What it does kill, fairly convincingly, is the specific viral claim that a nine-minute snooze cycle "restarts a sleep cycle" and wrecks your morning. There is no evidence for that.

The real cost is measured in minutes past nine, not in IQ points

Here is the part the wellness articles miss, and it is the more interesting story. Sleep inertia does not just make you groggy. It makes you a bad decision-maker, for up to an hour, starting at the precise moment your alarm asks you to make a decision. Lynn Trotti’s 2017 review in *Sleep Medicine Reviews* describes impairments to attention and executive function that are, in her words, comparable in size to legal intoxication in some studies.

The snooze button is a choice handed to the least capable version of you that has ever existed. Nine minutes later it hands it to you again, and by then you are deeper in. Nobody in that state is running a cost-benefit analysis about their standup meeting. They are pressing the button because the button is there.

That is why we did not build a snooze button that is hard to find, or one that gets angrier over time. We built an alarm that does not have one. You can read exactly how that works on the anti-snooze page.

Where the nine minutes came from, since we are debunking things

The nine-minute snooze interval is not a sleep-science decision and never was. It is a leftover from mechanical alarm clocks: the gear train that drove the snooze mechanism could not comfortably be made to run for a round ten minutes without redesigning the whole movement, so the industry settled on just under ten, and digital clocks inherited the number out of habit. Apple’s Clock app still uses it. Every "nine minutes is scientifically the worst possible interval" post you have read is retrofitting a story onto a gear ratio.

This is worth knowing because it tells you how much of the anti-snooze internet is invented. The number is arbitrary, the sleep-cycle claim is false, and the cognitive damage did not show up when someone finally measured it. Almost everything popularly believed about snoozing is wrong. What remains true is the boring part: you set the alarm for 6:00, you got up at 6:53, and your first meeting was at 7:30.

What your snoozing is actually telling you

Before you install anything, including our thing, snoozing is a symptom and it is usually pointing at one of three causes.

1. You are not getting enough sleep. The CDC’s 2016 analysis in *MMWR* found 35.2% of US adults sleep under seven hours a night. If that is you, no alarm app fixes it. An earlier bedtime does.
2. Your alarm is a fantasy. You set it for 6:00 because 6:00 is who you want to be, and you get up at 6:40 because 6:40 is who you are. Set the alarm for 6:40 and stop snoozing overnight.
3. Your chronotype is fighting your calendar. Evening types snooze more, and that is biology, not character. It does not excuse being late, but it does mean you need a harder mechanism than "try harder", because trying harder is what you have been doing.

Who should keep their snooze button

If you snooze for ten minutes, get up, and arrive on time, keep snoozing. The research is on your side and we have nothing to sell you. If you want to be woken gently, buy a sunrise lamp or use Sleep Cycle’s smart wake window — Risly is loud and adversarial by design, and it is the wrong tool for that job. And if you are on Android, Risly does not exist for you: it is iOS 26 and later only, because it is built on Apple’s AlarmKit.

Risly is for the other case. The one where you snoozed four times, you do not remember doing it, and you are now explaining yourself to someone. If that is the morning you keep having, the fix is not information. It is removing the button.