Is snoozing actually bad for you?

Probably not, and the internet has been lying to you about it. In 2024 the Journal of Sleep Research published two studies by Tina Sundelin, Shane Landry and John Axelsson: a survey of 1,732 adults on how they wake up, and a laboratory study of 31 habitual snoozers measured with polysomnography. The lab half is where the numbers come from: thirty minutes of snoozing cost those 31 people about six minutes of sleep, improved or did not affect performance on cognitive tests taken directly on rising, and, unexpectedly, kept the final awakening out of deep slow-wave sleep.

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.

We make Risly, an alarm app with no snooze button, so we have an obvious interest in this question. Which is why this page argues the opposite of what you would expect us to argue: the research says snoozing does not harm you, and every study it rests on is listed with its DOI at the bottom.

What did the snooze study actually find?

Sundelin, Landry and Axelsson’s 2024 Journal of Sleep Research paper found that snoozing is normal and that it is not doing what you were told it does. In the survey half, 69% of the 1,732 respondents said they used the snooze button or several alarms at least sometimes, and the people who did 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. In that second study, thirty-one habitual snoozers spent two mornings wired up in a sleep lab: one where they snoozed for thirty minutes, one where they got up on the first alarm. Snoozing cost around six minutes of total sleep. It did not degrade arithmetic speed, episodic or working memory, or Stroop performance (on three of those measures the snooze mornings came out marginally better), and there were no clear effects on the cortisol awakening response, on morning sleepiness, on mood, or on the night’s sleep architecture. The mechanism the authors propose is almost the opposite of the folklore: the snooze period keeps the final awakening from happening out of N3, the deep stage that produces the worst grogginess.

The honest caveats, because they matter: thirty-one people is a small lab sample, they were all habitual snoozers who find it easy to fall back asleep, the snooze period was capped at thirty minutes, and the authors’ own Bayes factors say several of those cognitive results need more data before anyone leans on them. 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 "restarts a sleep cycle" and wrecks your morning. There is no evidence for that.

A second, independent dataset says the same thing about your body and something harsher about your clock. For a 2022 paper in SLEEP, Mattingly and colleagues tracked 450 workers with wearables: 57% were snoozers, and they did not sleep less than the non-snoozers, were not sleepier and did not nap more. What separated the two groups was the shape of the morning. For snoozers, about 27 minutes elapsed between the first alarm and getting out of bed.

How many minutes does snoozing actually cost?

About six minutes of sleep (Journal of Sleep Research, 2024), and about twenty-seven minutes of your morning (SLEEP, 2022). Those are not the same currency, and nearly every article on this subject bills you in the wrong one. Six minutes of sleep is a rounding error against a seven-hour night. Twenty-seven minutes is the difference between a calm start and running for the train.

The scale of it is genuinely new information. In 2025, Rebecca Robbins and colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital published an analysis in Scientific Reports of 3,017,276 sleep sessions logged by 21,222 people in the Sleep Cycle app: 55.6% of those sessions ended with the snooze button, sessions that ended in a snooze burned about 11 minutes on average, and 45% of users snoozed on more than 80% of their mornings. Snoozing is not an occasional lapse anyone needs a lecture about. For nearly half the people doing it, it is simply how the morning works.

So why remove the snooze button at all?

Risly has no snooze button because the damage snoozing does is to your judgement, not to your test scores, and it lands at the exact moment the button appears. Sleep inertia does not just make you groggy: it makes you a bad decision-maker, for up to an hour, starting the second your alarm asks you to decide something. Wertz and colleagues, writing in JAMA in 2006, found that performance in the first minutes after waking was worse than after 26 hours of continuous wakefulness. Lynn Trotti’s 2017 review in Sleep Medicine Reviews covers the severe end of the same state, sleep drunkenness, and notes that in Ohayon’s population data about one adult in seven reported a confusional arousal in the previous year.

The snooze button is a choice handed to the least capable version of you that has ever existed, which is why every tactic in how to stop hitting snooze ends up being a way to take the choice away rather than win it. 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 press the button because the button is there.

An illustrative case, not a study participant. Ollie is 26 and loads a delivery van out of a depot in Bristol; first alarm 5:20, wheels moving by 6:15. He remembers two of the four times he snoozed that Tuesday. The 5:38 one he has no memory of at all, and no memory of deciding anything either, which is the whole point, because nothing was decided. By 5:56 it had stopped being a series of choices and become a loop he was inside. The six minutes of sleep he gained is not the part of that morning that cost him anything.

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.

Why is the snooze interval nine minutes?

The nine-minute snooze interval comes from 1950s clock engineering, not from a sleep study, though the specific explanation is repeated far more often than it is documented. It traces to the first snooze clocks of the 1950s, like the General Electric-Telechron Snooz-Alarm of 1956: the existing gear train 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. That account is repeated far more often than it is documented, so file it as clock-industry folklore rather than fact. What is certain is that Apple’s Clock app still uses nine minutes, and that 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 is your snoozing actually telling you?

Habitual snoozing usually signals one of three things, and only one of them is fixed by an app. Snoozing is a symptom: of not enough sleep, of a body clock that is not where you need it, or of an alarm you can beat without waking, which is its own problem covered in sleeping through your alarm.

1. You are not getting enough sleep. The CDC’s 2016 analysis in MMWR found that 65.2% of US adults reported seven hours or more, leaving 34.8% below it. 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.

Fair questions