I'm not a fan of the snooze alarm.

[conuly]

It occurs to me that trading thirty minutes of sleep for thirty minutes of disrupted sleep is a pretty bad exchange. And who are you kidding? If you set your alarm 30 minutes early, but you don't really *need* to get up at that time, do you honestly expect you'll get up half an hour earlier than you actually need to?

I went and googled about this, and it turns out that the snooze alarm is even worse than I thought. At least, according to Google. Apparently, it sends you back into deep sleep, and what's the point of that? Ever since I worked this out, I've lived by the simple rule: set the clock when you're willing to get up, then get up. If you realize you set it an hour too early, cut your losses and reset it then and there for a new time, don't do that silly snooze thing.

Comments

[delphi]

My practice is: set the alam clock for the very last moment you would have to get up to get to work, and then consistently wake up half an hour earlier because you're terrified by the sound an alarm clock makes.

[conuly]

Well, so long as it works? There are alarm clocks that sound less awful, I think.

[kyrielle]

Unfortunately, if very tired, I smack "off" without waking up enough to realize what I'm doing. Having "snooze" be there and off be harder to hit, and snooze makes it shut up, means it tries again later. If I go with not having a snooze alarm, I can expect to not get up until I'm slept out and late for work some days. :(

[conuly]

The official advice to this that a doctor would give is probably "go to bed earlier!"

But I guess the more usual advice of "put your alarm clock in another room so you have to run around the house to fetch it" works as well. I think Clocky is adorable, with those little wheels, but my sister vows to murder me in my sleep if one enters the home.