Sleep is an essential activity that all humans must engage in or we would quickly experience a variety of health problems and eventually die. In a perfect world, people would be able to go to sleep at a convenient time and sleep for as long as their body needed, waking up naturally.

While that sure sounds nice. It is not an option for most people. People today have jobs, families, and other things that require them to wake up at set times each day, which is why alarm clocks were invented.

Unfortunately, soon after alarm clocks were invented, so was the snooze button. This button shuts off the alarm for a few minutes (typically between 5 and 10) and then triggers the alarm again. The idea is that the user will wake up, hit the snooze button, and then be woken up again.

Sleep experts and other medical professionals generally agree that using the snooze button is a bad idea. Most of the time, people are in the middle of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is an important part of deep sleep, when the alarm goes off. Once they hit the snooze button, they will be lucky to get back to even a light sleep before the alarm goes off again.

The person would be much better off setting the alarm for the latest time possible and getting extra REM sleep than using the snooze button and just getting a small amount of light sleep.

While experts have been telling people to stop using their snooze button for years, it is still extremely common according to a recent study published in Scientific Reports.

The study was done by Dr. Rebecca Robins of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and her colleagues. They gave 21,000 people the Sleep Cycle app and monitored their usage over the course of a collective 3 million nights.

In 55.6 percent of those nights, the snooze button was employed. 45% of the participants in the study used that snooze button more than 80% of the time. From the time the first alarm went off until the participants actually got up, they added an average of just 11 minutes of sleep. In a statement about the study. Dr. Robins said:

“Many of us hit the snooze alarm in the morning with the hope of getting a ‘little more sleep,” but this widely practiced phenomenon has received little attention in sleep research. Unfortunately, the snooze alarm disrupts some of the most important stages of sleep,” said Robbins. “The hours just before waking are rich in rapid eye movement sleep. Hitting the snooze alarm will interrupt these critical stages of sleep and typically only offer you light sleep in between snooze alarms. The best approach for optimizing your sleep and next day performance is to set your alarm for the latest possible time, then commit to getting out of bed when your first alarm goes off.”

Most of the data collected in this study confirms what the average person already knows. People use the snooze button a lot, and it doesn’t help them to get more deep and restful sleep. Unexpectedly, they found that the group of people who used the snooze button the least were those who were getting five or fewer hours of sleep that night.

This may be because those who are getting so little sleep are waking up for an important meeting or other event that they cannot miss. The participant didn’t want to risk being late, so as soon as the alarm went off, they would get right up. In addition, this suggests that people know that when they are getting very little sleep, it is best to set their alarm for as late as they can and get up right away.

Of course, knowing what is best and actually forcing yourself to do it on those mornings when you are so tired when the alarm goes off is very difficult.

If you found that story interesting, learn more about why people often wake up around 3 AM and keep doing it for life.