What’s the best number of alarms? Sleep experts answer

(NEXSTAR) – Do you have a snooze problem? Sneaking in a few extra minutes after the alarm goes off (again and again) may actually be cheating you from feeling rested, sleep experts say.

“My general advice is that you set one alarm. The more alarms you have, the harder it’s going to be for you to wake up in the morning,” said sleep psychologist Alicia Roth with Cleveland Clinic .

Setting multiple alarms or hitting snooze fragments your sleep, which can make you feel less energized once you do wake up. If you have an alarm going off at 6:30, 6:45 and then 7, you just robbed yourself of 30 minutes of high-quality sleep.

“Fragmentation of whatever sleep you can get at the end of your night is going to have a negative effect on your body’s ability to really commit to waking up,” writes sleep coach Beatrix Schmidt .

Instead, experts advise, just be honest with yourself about what time you actually have to wake up, and set one alarm for that time. Putting your alarm far from your bed, so you have to wake up and turn it off, can help you wake up. Alarms that use light, or getting some sunlight in the morning, can also help wake up your brain.

Whenever possible, keeping your sleep routine pretty consistent between weekdays and weekends can help your body get used to waking up around the same time.

If you’re a multiple alarm person right now, Roth said it’s OK to slowly work your way down to just one.

While the one-alarm advice is the consensus from experts, they acknowledge that it’s just true on average. People with sleep disorders or later circadian rhythms may experience more trouble getting restful sleep and waking up when it’s time.

“We never want to sleep shame people,” Dr. Cathy Goldstein, a sleep medicine physician at the Michigan Medicine Sleep Disorders Centers, told CNN . “In medicine, and in public health we operate on averages a lot of the time, what’s best for the most. But there are these biological differences, and we want to make sure that everybody is optimizing their sleep the best that they can.”

Trouble waking up in the morning may be a sign of underlying sleep issues, and seeing a sleep specialist could help you get answers.

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