Experts Say There's A Legit Reason Why You Set 10 Alarms & Sleep Through Every Single One

by Jordan Bissell

March 6, 2019

Original article: https://www.elitedaily.com/p/why-do-i-set-10-alarms-then-sleep-through-all-of-them-experts-say-theres-a-method-to-your-madness-15958362

You're cozy underneath your comforter, dreaming of fluffy puppies and perfectly gooey cookies, and then your alarm goes off. All of a sudden, you have a choice to make: pull yourself out of your warm bed and face the world, or enjoy 10 more minutes of relaxation until your next next alarm goes off. (You know — the extra one you set because you knew the first one, and the second one, weren't going to be enough to get you up.) I rarely jump up the instant I hear my alarm, and I don't exactly spring out of bed at the second or third (or even fourth) one either. So why do I set 10 alarms and then sleep through all of them? Does that extra "sleep" actually make me more rested, or does it just confuse my brain?

Setting multiple alarms in the morning and then sleeping through every single one might not sound like it makes much sense, but that doesn't mean you're the only one doing it. A survey of over 1,000 people in the U.S., which included millennials, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Gen Zers, by the mattress company Sleep Junkie, found that 21 percent of people set at least two alarms in the morning before they actually get out of bed.

But the tendency to hit snooze again and again and again doesn't just mean you're lazy and don't want to wake up. In an interview with Elite Daily, Jason Piper, sleep coach and owner of the coaching platform The Alpha Human Project, says there are two potential reasons why you can't get out of bed the first time your alarm sounds. First, he says, it's possible that you're simply not getting enough sleep each night. This would mean that when your first alarm goes off in the morning, your body has a very high sleep inertia (aka that super disoriented feeling you have when you wake up feeling exhausted), and it wants you to stay asleep, which makes it very hard to wake up and get going right away.

On the other hand, your circadian rhythm — your body's internal clock, which your brain uses to make you feel sleepy or awake, per the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) — might be off, and you could unknowingly be setting your first alarm to go off in the middle of your sleep cycle, says Piper.

According to the NSF, a sleep cycle includes two distinct parts — rapid eye movement (better known as REM) sleep and non-REM sleep — and about five separate stages. In the first two stages of a sleep cycle, you're basically in a light slumber. At first, you're "somewhat alert and can be easily woken," the foundation explains, but pretty soon, your "brain waves slow down," and you start to drift further into sleep. Then, stages three and four are considered "deep sleep," per the NSF, meaning you're at the point where it'd be pretty hard to wake you up, and your body's beginning to build up energy for the next day, though you're likely not dreaming just yet. Dreams almost always happen during REM sleep, the last (and arguably most important) stage of a sleep cycle, when "your brain consolidates and processes information from the day before so that it can be stored in your long-term memory," according to the NSF.

Overall, your body goes through these stages about five or six times during one night's sleep, and when you wake up in the middle of, say, REM sleep, it can feel really disorienting and therefore much harder to get out of bed. "Naturally, our cortisol [the stress hormone] levels will rise and wake us up in the morning," Piper says, "but if their rhythm is not in sync with when we need to wake up, then they are trying to wake up while they still have melatonin [the sleep hormone] circulating through their system." In other words, if you tend to be a major night owl, your body might want you to sleep from 2 a.m. to 10 a.m., instead of a sleep schedule more conducive to the average 9-to-5 day job.

Of course, some people set multiple alarms every day to save themselves the stress of worrying about whether they'll actually wake up on time in the morning. It's like a safety net of sorts, you know?

In a way, says Christopher Lindholst, sleep expert and CEO of the nap pod company MetroNaps, this could be helpful, if it genuinely allows you to avoid lying awake all night worrying about the next morning. But according to Dr. Andrea Lopez-Yianilos, a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in treatments for trauma, sleep issues, depression, and more, snoozing multiple alarms on a regular basis isn't really a great habit to have in general, in terms of your overall sleep quality. "It would be more beneficial to set one alarm at your desired wake time and be able to sleep up until that time, instead of having multiple awakenings leading up to the final wake time," she says.