Sign up for CNN’s “Sleep, But Better” newsletter series. Our 7-part guide is packed with helpful tips to help you sleep better.
CNN
—
Let’s say you need to wake up by 7am to get to work on time.
So to avoid hitting the snooze button, you set your first smartphone alarm for 6:30 AM, a second for 6:45 AM, and a third for 6:55 AM, plus add in a 7:05 AM one just to be sure.
Does this sound familiar? Experts say that having a clock app full of morning alarms could make you feel sleepy in the morning.
Hitting the snooze button and extending your sleep time by nine minutes at a time can have the same effect, said Dr. Brandon Peters, a neurologist and sleep medicine physician at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle.
“Hitting the snooze button and delaying getting out of bed to start your day may feel satisfying in the moment, but it actually fragments and impairs the quality of your sleep,” Peters says.
The final few hours of sleep typically involve cycles of rapid eye movement sleep, or REM sleep, the fourth and final stage of the sleep cycle. This stage is especially important for memory processing and creative thinking, he added. When this stage of sleep is fragmented, brain function can be affected.
He recommends setting one alarm so that you can have deep, uninterrupted sleep until you need to get up in the morning.
Here’s how to train your mind and body to get out of bed the first time your alarm goes off.
Certain sleep disorders, like sleep inertia, can cause you to have trouble waking up with a single alarm in the morning, says Dr. Cathy Goldstein, a sleep medicine physician at Michigan Medicine’s Sleep Disorders Center. Sleep inertia makes it hard to transition out of sleep. As a result, you might unknowingly turn off your alarm or snooze it when you first wake up.
But she says that people who need multiple alarms to get up in the morning are most likely not getting enough sleep.
First, Goldstein said people should try to identify any underlying issues that may be causing the problem.
“First of all, are you getting the amount of sleep you need? Not the amount of sleep you think you should get or the amount of sleep you’d like to get, but the amount of sleep you actually need, and are you getting that sleep every night?” asked Goldstein, who is also a clinical professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Medical School.
Most adults 7–9 hours How much sleep a night varies from student to student, and figuring out how much sleep you need takes time. Goldstein encourages students to take advantage of the summer break and see how much sleep they naturally get after a few weeks. A long break might provide some helpful answers.
Another reason we have to battle our alarms every morning is because we’re naturally night owls, but our work schedules require us to get up early, says Alicia Roth, M.D., a clinician at the Cleveland Clinic Sleep Disorders Center in Ohio. “In an ideal world, we’d go to sleep when we felt sleepy and get up when we felt wakeful, but that’s not the world we live in.”
but There are ways to gradually shift your body clock. It also makes early morning commutes to work easier, she added.
Ross said that if you have to get up at 7am and your alarm goes off at 6am, instead of sleeping through until 7am you’ll end up losing an hour of poor quality sleep.
It’s best to set just one alarm, but after using multiple alarms as a safety measure, waking up to just one alarm can be difficult, she adds.
Ross suggests trying out different alarm clocks, including ones that use light or that you have to get out of bed to turn off. Getting 15 to 30 minutes of sunlight in the morning can also help regulate your body clock, which is especially important for night owls, says the author of his new book, “How to Get Rid of Your Sleep Problems.”Sleep apnea hypothesis.”
Goldstein said it’s also important to wake up and go to bed at roughly the same time every day. “If you’re someone who sleeps soundly from 3 a.m. to noon on the weekends, but you have to get up at 6 a.m. on Monday morning to commute to work, that’s a struggle,” he said. “That’s earlier than your physiological wakefulness time, so it’s going to be very difficult to wake up.”
Goldstein suggests that people who want to shift their biological clock should try going to bed 30 minutes earlier every few days, or one hour earlier once a week, adding that avoiding bright light and limiting screen time to four hours before bedtime can also help stimulate the body’s natural production of melatonin.
If you wake up before your alarm goes off, Peters recommends not checking the time, as you might start worrying about how much sleep you have left and what the day holds, making it harder to get back to sleep.
Instead, Peters suggests going back to sleep until it feels like 15 to 20 minutes have passed. If you’re still awake, you can check the time and decide whether to get up that day, she adds. “If it’s close to your normal wake-up time, you could start your day a little earlier. If it’s the middle of the night, do something quiet, like reading, and go back to bed if you start to feel more sleepy.”
While some people may be able to wake up naturally without an alarm clock, Goldstein says that’s not a realistic goal, especially for people who experience sleep inertia or who are born with a slower body clock.
“We certainly don’t want to shame people for sleep,” she says. “In medicine and public health, we often operate on averages, on what’s best for the majority of people, but there are biological differences, and we want to empower everyone to optimize their sleep as much as possible.”