Snooze Alarm – The button that replaced our childhood memories of “mommy just 5 minutes moorreee please!”.
Ever wondered why snooze is for 9 minutes and not 10 minutes. Why this strange odd number! Its because back in the day of the mechanical clocks it was easier to have a cog that triggered the alarm in single digits. So the 9 minute mark was set.
Today our digital alarms having no such restrictions still sets the standard at 9 minutes. It has nothing to do with cool things like sleep cycles and brain waves, as we have been led to believe.
In truth everytime we hit the snooze button and go back to sleep we are almost always destroying our sleep. Imagine being constantly woken up. Doesn’t feel good. Which is why post a few snoozes we fell like we haven’t slept well.
Just three snoozes and you have lost close to half an hour of good proper sleep. While half an hour might not seem like a lot. In sleep terms, it’s a lot to get half an hour more of proper restful sleep.
Very often we end up pressing snooze because we don’t want the day to start. We don’t have anything exciting to do that day. Or we don’t have a purpose that fulfills us enough to jump out of bed.
This is a very big problem, that the little snooze button is hinting at. Is that you? Are you feeling like you are stuck in a grind, everything seems so laborious. New day same shit? Heck, nobody would want to get out of bed in that situation.
Today about 50% of the population are snoozers. So let’s calculate. 30 minutes a day of snoozing, if not more. Over two weeks is 7 hours. That means every two weeks we lose close to one full workday!
Now that’s 50% of the people losing close to a full day of work every two weeks. Over a year, that’s close to 26 days! Heck that’s almost the month of February! All from just snoozing! Alarming isn’t it! (see what I did there?)
Now I know there were a lot of approximations in that calculation. But you quickly realize how productive time slips away when we look at it from such a large scale.
Just by avoiding the snooze button you can reclaim back so much lost time.
The problem with snooze is that it is easy to reach. Easy to press and easy to say 5 minutes more pleaaaaseeee.
The phone lie next to us. Less than an arm’s reach away.
So your simple habit to begin getting over your snooze addiction is to keep your phone charging at the other end of the room. Far enough to make you get out of bed, go to the phone and put it off.
Now this is the key bit, after hitting snooze immediately go to the washroom and splash water on your face. If you like put a Post It note on your phone, saying wash face!