December 5, 2024 ~1 minute minutes read Dimitris

The anxiety tax of using the snooze button.

I found out that some people set their first alarm 30 minutes earlier than when they actually want to wake up, programming in a series of interruptions to their sleep. Each morning, they endure what they planned. Fragments of rest punctuated by the sound of their alarm, each snooze creating a new boundary between sleep and wakefulness.

The math is simple. A 30-minute buffer means losing 182.5 hours of solid sleep every year. That's over a week of rest traded for fragments of low-quality, interrupted sleep. In that groggy space between alarms, you're neither getting proper rest nor starting your day. You exist in a self-imposed limbo.