In 2025, sleep scientist Dr Rebecca Robbins of Brigham and Women's Hospital and colleagues analysed over three million nights of sleep data from 21,000 people worldwide. Their study, published in Scientific Reports, found the snooze button was pressed on nearly 56% of all mornings — and 45% of people snoozed on more than 80% of their mornings, losing around 20 minutes a day [1]. Five full days a year.
The decision to snooze isn't really made by you — it's made by a groggy, half-conscious version of you experiencing sleep inertia: the fog that sleep researchers Patricia Tassi and Alain Muzet described as impairing reaction time, memory and judgement for 30–60 minutes after waking, sometimes longer [2]. Asking that version of you to make a good long-term decision is like asking someone at 2am after three pints. Willpower isn't the tool for this job.
As Robbins put it: "the sleep between snooze alarms is fragmented, light sleep — the snooze alarm disrupts some of the most important stages of sleep" [1]. The minutes you buy are too short to complete anything restorative, just deep enough to restart the waking process from scratch. Snooze three times and you've woken up four times in one morning. (For balance: a 2024 study led by Stockholm University's Dr Tina Sundelin found habitual snoozers lose only ~6 minutes of sleep and suffer no dramatic mood harm [3] — snoozing won't ruin you. It just quietly taxes you, every single day.)
The oldest advice in the book — put the alarm across the room — works because it stops negotiating with sleepy-you and simply requires a behaviour: stand up. Behavioural studies consistently show that structured wake-up tasks beat intention and motivation at breaking the snooze loop.
Every reliable fix for snoozing has the same shape: make getting up the path of least resistance, and make staying down annoying.
That's the principle behind mission-based alarms: the sound doesn't stop for a button press — it stops for evidence. A filmed journal page. Five hundred counted steps. A timed breathing session. By the time the mission is done, sleep inertia has lifted and the decision to get up has already been executed by the only version of you that could be trusted with it: the one who set the alarm last night.
People who stop snoozing rarely describe it as discipline. They describe it as identity — what James Clear calls identity-based habits: every action is "a vote for the type of person you wish to become" [4]. Each morning the alarm wins, that identity gets one vote stronger.