The Hidden Dangers of the Snooze Button (and why I had to stop pushing it)

Sleep expert Dr. Neil Stanley has told me in interviews on my radio show that every time we hear an alarm go off while we’re sleeping, it triggers our body’s “fight or flight response,” which means the next thing that happens is that our body is flooded with cortisol – the stress hormone. Dr. Stanley says that’s not usually a big deal if you actually wake up and start your day……But he says if we hit “snooze” and drift back to sleep, then what happens is that we guarantee ANOTHER jolt of cortisol in 9 minutes! And then after a while, when we keep doing this over and over again, there’s so much of that stress hormone that it ends up damaging cells and that, he says, increases our risk of depression! All of this from the snooze alarm…YIKES. So this is why sleep experts pretty much all agree that you and I need to set our alarm for the exact time we want to wake up, and then always get up at that time. And yes, I know it’s easy to say. It’s harder to pull off every morning. Just so you know, I get up at 5am each morning, even on the weekends. But it takes the alarm on my watch plus an alarm clock that I put all the way across the room to get me out of the bed. I used to get up at 8 but I always felt like I was playing catchup for the rest of the day. By the way, one of the things that really helps me get going in the morning is preparing everything that I need to start the day. So I lay out my clothes right beside the bed. I put my sneakers at the bedroom door. I even prepare the coffee machine the night before so I all I have to do is flip the switch. My goal is to eliminate any barriers to my 5 o’clock morning. And one more thing: I try very hard not to scroll through the news headlines on my phone until I’ve read 10 pages in a self help book that’s on the kindle on my phone. I just randomly pick one book. This morning it was the book, ‘Winning’ by fitness trainer Tim Grover. Even if you don’t have a book on your phone you can go to the website ‘Goodreads’ and find amazing passages from self help books….including the Bible, by the way. Bottom line: We should probably wean ourselves off the snooze button because now there’s science to support the reasons.

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