Doctor explains why you feel worse when you hit snooze and go back to sleep for an hour
If you've woken up way too early for no good reason, going back to bed for that extra hour of sleep may not be as beneficial as you'd hoped.
Instead, you're better off just staying awake, because slipping back into sleep will leave you feeling groggy and agitated since you've disturbed your 90-minute sleep cycle.
'If you were to sleep till you woke up naturally, often, you'd be fine because you'd be in the natural cycle. But then, when you fall asleep and then your alarm wakes you up … you have a good chance of ending up awakening in a deeper sleep phase when you weren't meant to wake up,' Dr. Greg Mahr, a psychiatrist at Henry Ford Health, told The Independent. 'You feel really groggy because you haven't gone through the natural rhythm.'
Changes in the brain are 'fairly clear,' he said, looking at recordings of brain activity.
When you interrupt those deeper stages of sleep, it can take a while to recover, whereas, being woken up in other lighter stages of sleep does not yield the same results. This is true even if you technically get enough sleep.
'It's typically not listening to our body cycles and trying to override them because of our schedules and alarm clocks,' Mahr noted.
Alarm clocks can play a major role in sleep health. Recent research has found that more than 50 percent of 3 million sleep sessions studied ended in a 'snooze.' People spent an average of 11 minutes between snooze alarms before waking and heavy snoozers averaged 20 minutes a day, according to Dr. Rebecca Robbins, a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
'Unfortunately, the snooze alarm disrupts some of the most important stages of sleep. The hours just before waking are rich in rapid eye movement sleep. Hitting the snooze alarm will interrupt these critical stages of sleep and typically only offer you light sleep in between snooze alarms,' she explained.
How many alarms you set can also be a red flag, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine Dr. Rachel Salas.
'If you're a 10-alarm person, that is a huge red flag. If you have to hit the snooze button and you're not waking up, that's a red flag that something may be going on while you're sleeping that you're not aware of,' she explained. 'You might have an undiagnosed, untreated sleep disorder.'
People might not be able to control their variable work schedules or environmental conditions. But, can they hack the system? Can you sneak a little extra sleep in without feeling the effects? Salas says you can.
'Taking a nap before 3 p.m. for less than an hour – ideally, 20 or 30 minutes – that's one way to pay back and not affect the other process that's important for sleep that runs with the circadian rhythm. It's called the homeostatic drive,' she said. Otherwise, you can get yourself in a vicious cycle of bad sleep.
But there's one way to ensure you're waking up as fresh as can be.
'The best approach for optimizing your sleep and next day performance is to set your alarm for the latest possible time, then commit to getting out of bed when your first alarm goes off,' Robbins said.
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A year before, in a letter dated 16 September 1888, Vincent tells his brother, Theo, that he is doing six to 12 hours of non-stop work, often at night, followed by 12 hours of sleep. By the following year he was in the grip of a 'FEARSOME' insomnia. On 9 January 1889, weeks after slicing part of his ear off in a high state of anxiety, he writes to Theo about his torment. He is fighting sleeplessness with a 'very, very strong dose of camphor' on his pillow and mattress, he says, and he hopes it will bring an end to the insomnia. 'I dare to believe that it won't recur.' I read Van Gogh's hope as optimistic desperation. In my case, it has always returned. Yet, even in his 'insensible' state, Vincent tells Theo that he is reflecting on the work of Degas, Gauguin and his own art practice; he continues to think, paint, write letters, with the insomnia existing alongside his productivity. The glittering night sky Van Gogh imagines beyond the confines of his asylum is an embodiment of the way we so often think of the gifted artist at night: synapses fizzing, imagination touched by divinity, a compulsively unsleeping genius channelling a heightened state of buoyant creativity. Countless artists and writers have elected to work after dark, from Toulouse-Lautrec, documenting night revelries at the Moulin Rouge, to Franz Kafka, Philip Guston and Patricia Highsmith. Musicians, too: the Rolling Stones' all-night jam in the lead-up to their appearance at Knebworth in 1976, for instance; or Prince, whose recording sessions could last across a continuous 24 hours. Certainly, if Van Gogh still suffered from insomnia when he was painting The Starry Night, it makes sleeplessness seem beatific – a curse turned gift. There is none of this buoyancy in Louise Bourgeois's night scribblings. She suffered from sleeplessness throughout her life but faced a particularly debilitating bout of night-time anxiety between 1994 and 1995, during which time she made her Insomnia Drawings series. 'It is conquerable,' she said, and for her it was conquered, by filling page after page of a drawing diary with deliriously repeated doodles and circles within circles, a mess of scribbles that look like screams on paper. They are so different from the enormous stainless steel, bronze and marble spiders and other caged sculptures for which Bourgeois is better known, but I feel a peculiar kind of excitement upon seeing these images, with their agitating boredom and alertness, side by side. The artist Lee Krasner also painted her way through chronic insomnia, around the time her mother and then her husband, the painter Jackson Pollock, died – the latter in a drink-driving car crash in 1956, with his lover Ruth Kligman, who survived, in the seat beside him. Krasner's Night Journeys series has some similarities to Bourgeois's drawings, featuring repeating, abstract patterns, but washed in an earthy sepia brown. The patterns are insect-like, as if ants are crawling across the retina. I am inspired by the images. Rather than seeking escape or avoidance of their sleepless state, Bourgeois and Krasner stare it in the face, and it stares back at them, an abyss of maddening monotony. There has only been one instance in my adult life when sleep became easy. Or rather, it became compulsive – as much as the insomnia was, and perhaps even more disturbing. It happened when Fauzia died in 2016, at the age of 45, of undiagnosed tuberculosis. She had been admitted to hospital with an unknown illness, and lay wired to a ventilator in intensive care. When the hospital called to say she had had a fatal brain haemorrhage one morning, the shock of it was too much to take in. So I began to sleep. No amount was enough and I felt increasingly worried by the long, blank nights, which did not bring relief but became as strangely burdensome as the insomnia had once felt. Haruki Murakami's novel After Dark features two sisters, the younger, Mari, mourning the older sibling, Eri, who is in a coma-like state. The book takes place over a single night in Tokyo as Mari roams through the city, meeting its nocturnal characters: a trombonist, a Chinese sex worker, the manager of a love hotel. All the while Eri lies in a trapped and mysterious kind of sleep. It might be an undiagnosed illness, a psychological condition or even a radical protest at the world and her place in it – we are never sure. Mari refuses to see her sister as 'dead', even though there seems no prospect of Eri's waking up. She looks at her sister's face and thinks that 'consciousness just happens to be missing from it at the moment: it may have gone into hiding, but it must certainly be flowing somewhere out of sight, far below the surface, like a vein of water'. This is how I saw Fauzia as she lay in hospital, after her haemorrhage. Even though we were told she'd remain on a ventilator for 24 hours as a formality before being pronounced dead, I kept watching for her to twitch awake, sure that it would happen. It seemed as if she was in a deep sleep, albeit so submerged by it that she had become unreachable. In her lifetime, Fauzia went through long bouts of oversleeping brought on by depression. There seemed to be a rebellion in it, too. From the age of 19, when she first became seriously depressed, she began holing herself up in her room, sleeping for the night and most of the following day. In the medieval era, the act of daytime sleeping, for men and for women, was seen to harm one's reputation. Many still regard it as slovenly and it can be subversive for exactly this reason. For a woman, especially, to refuse to get up and assume her role in the world – which may be one of monotonous domesticity, of caring for others, or of participating in the tedious, lower-rung machinery of capitalist productivity – might be a defiant act of saying 'no'. What might look like inertia, or passivity, can be an active summoning of inner strength, as suggested by Bruno Bettelheim in his psychoanalytic interpretations of fairytales in The Uses of Enchantment. He speaks of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) not as an example of meek femininity but as an adolescent 'gathering strength in solitude'. Her sleep is a temporary turning inward in order to foment, mobilise and psychically prepare for the battles of adulthood to come. A glassy-eyed, self-medicating woman in Ottessa Moshfegh's novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation also 'hibernates' in her New York apartment. She is a Manhattan princess, narcissistic and hard to like, who does not want to experience any of life's sharp edges. Yet there is something I recognise in her overwhelming desire to disconnect from the terrible reality of the world. She plans to sleep for a year and wake up cured of her sadness, and she is. My sleep wasn't a cure, but the oversleeping did eventually lift and leave me feeling less numbed to my own sadness. Now I was glad to be returned to myself, and to my insomnia – an old friend, missed. There is evidence to suggest that women sleep differently from men and feel the effects of insomnia in discrete ways. Professor Dijk cites the familiar list of causes, from lifestyle to social class, wealth and genetics, but he has also found sex-based biological factors, with differences in the brainwaves of women and men when they sleep. Women intrinsically have different circadian rhythms, which are on average six minutes shorter than men's cycles; they experience more deep (or 'slow wave') sleep and may need to sleep for longer; while a mix of social factors, from breastfeeding to lower-paid shift work, means they face higher levels of insomnia. Sleep science makes a significant connection between hormones and sleep for women in the throes of menopause. About 50% of women who suffer with insomnia as they approach menopause are thought to sleep for less than six hours a night. The cumulative effects of this sleeplessness can be so intense that some have questioned whether they might be linked to UK female suicide rates, which are at their highest between the ages of 50 and 54. This brings another kind of insomnia for me, as I turn 50. It creeps duplicitously into my night, so I don't recognise it; I fall asleep quickly but am awake again at 4am with alarm-clock precision. This is not the organic and woozy 'biphasic' interruption believed by some to have been common in the centuries before electric light, in which communities were said to have a first and then a second sleep through the night, getting up to work or chat in between in a brief window referred to as 'the watch'. My brain is pin-sharp, as if the sleep before has been entirely restorative and I am ready to start the day, except there is a move towards a certain line of thought, a search for the faultlines of the previous day, the urgent address of an old argument or decision far in the future. And it is, in its scratchy insistence, so much like Bourgeois's scribbled red balls and Krasner's insects, that I wonder if they were experiencing menopausal sleep disruption while creating their works. Whereas younger insomniacs struggle to fall asleep, those in midlife might doze off quickly but wake up in the middle of the night as a result of hormonal changes, and it is in these 4am 'reckonings' that they encounter the night-time brain, says Dr Zoe Schaedel, who sits on the British Menopause Society's medical advisory council. 'Our frontal lobe [which regulates logical thought] doesn't activate as well overnight, and our amygdala [the brain's command centre for emotions, including fear, rage and anxiety] takes over.' So the very nature of thinking is different at 4am. In the daytime it is primarily logical, but at night we become more rash, anxious, catastrophic. That sets off its own physiological reaction in the nervous system, with a surge of adrenaline and cortisol, as well as rising heart and breathing rates. Between the waking, there is a welter of dreams, so many it seems like someone is changing between the channels on a TV set. Dr Schaedel says this apparent assault of dreams is an illusion. When oestrogen drops, women start sleeping more lightly and waking up in the latter part of the night, in the shallower REM, or dream, phase, which gives the impression of dreaming more because you are waking up more often in the midst of them. Still, I am wrongfooted by this second life in my head, this middle-aged night, as busy, as complicated and as exhausting as the day. When insomnia is at its most agitating, engaging the brain visually may be a way to lull ourselves back to sleep, says Dr Schaedel. This idea makes better sense of Bourgeois's scribbling. Maybe I would find my own recurring patterns on paper if I did the same thing, I think, and so I put a notebook beside my bed. I know I have had a maelstrom of dreams but, when I try to discover them on paper, it is like a stuck sneeze. I write a few words down, but I am left straining for more. A few snatched images come back, but far more float out of view, so much unreachable. The next night I can recall even fewer details, although I know I have dreamed heavily. So my odyssey of dreams evades any attempt at codification. They are determined to remain mysterious, on the other side of daytime. This is an edited extract from Wolf Moon: A Woman's Journey into the Night, published by Sceptre on 3 July at (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
