Think Twice Before You Hit the Snooze Button

Odds are good that you’re still in a drowsy state of mind when your alarm clock goes off, but a recent study is encouraging you to think twice before you automatically reach for the snooze button.

According to Matthew Walker, a top sleep scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, waking up to an alarm clock causes an explosive burst of activity in the heart, so hitting the snooze button each day is an invitation for sustained heart trauma.

“Why would you expose your heart to the same stress three or four times in ten minutes?” Walker asked in a recent interview with The Times. “You might laugh, but if you do that every day across ten years, you can only imagine the cardiovascular effect. It’s far from trivial.”

Walker points out that humans are the only species that purposefully impact our sleep habits, and the author of the book Why We Sleep noted that it comes at a steep cost.

“Every principal disease that is killing us has a causal link to lack of sleep: Alzheimer’s, obesity, mental health disorders,” Walker said. “There is no better Swiss army knife of health you could give a patient than good sleep.”

In addition to getting eight hours of sleep and eliminating the snooze button from your life, Walker’s other top recommendation involving the importance of sleep is to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, even if you fall behind on sleep.

“If I take you and deprive you of exercise, food, or sleep for 24 hours, which causes the greater biological harm? It’s taking away your sleep,” Walker emphasized. “It’s not painful, doesn’t involve an injection, and doesn’t taste bad. Sometimes consciousness is overrated.”