If you’ve woken up way too early for no good reason, going back to bed for that extra hour of sleep may not be as beneficial as you’d hoped.
Instead, you’re better off just staying awake, because slipping back into sleep will leave you feeling groggy and agitated since you’ve disturbed your 90-minute sleep cycle.
“If you were to sleep till you woke up naturally, often, you’d be fine because you’d be in the natural cycle. But then, when you fall asleep and then your alarm wakes you up … you have a good chance of ending up awakening in a deeper sleep phase when you weren’t meant to wake up,” Dr. Greg Mahr, a psychiatrist at Henry Ford Health, told The Independent. “You feel really groggy because you haven’t gone through the natural rhythm.”
Changes in the brain are “fairly clear,” he said, looking at recordings of brain activity.
When you interrupt those deeper stages of sleep, it can take a while to recover, whereas, being woken up in other lighter stages of sleep does not yield the same results. This is true even if you technically get enough sleep.
“It’s typically not listening to our body cycles and trying to override them because of our schedules and alarm clocks,” Mahr noted.
Alarm clocks can play a major role in sleep health. Recent research has found that more than 50 percent of 3 million sleep sessions studied ended in a “snooze.” People spent an average of 11 minutes between snooze alarms before waking and heavy snoozers averaged 20 minutes a day, according to Dr. Rebecca Robbins, a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
“Unfortunately, the snooze alarm disrupts some of the most important stages of sleep. 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,” she explained.
How many alarms you set can also be a red flag, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine Dr. Rachel Salas.
“If you’re a 10-alarm person, that is a huge red flag. If you have to hit the snooze button and you’re not waking up, that’s a red flag that something may be going on while you’re sleeping that you’re not aware of,” she explained. “You might have an undiagnosed, untreated sleep disorder.”
People might not be able to control their variable work schedules or environmental conditions. But, can they hack the system? Can you sneak a little extra sleep in without feeling the effects? Salas says you can.
“Taking a nap before 3 p.m. for less than an hour – ideally, 20 or 30 minutes – that’s one way to pay back and not affect the other process that’s important for sleep that runs with the circadian rhythm. It’s called the homeostatic drive,” she said. Otherwise, you can get yourself in a vicious cycle of bad sleep.
But there’s one way to ensure you’re waking up as fresh as can be.
“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,” Robbins said.
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