What is the ideal time duration for your snooze alarm?

Snooze alarms are for weak people who need to be coddled :-)

My alarm goes off and I am up – out of bed within 10 seconds. Standing and ready to greet the challenges of the day.

We’re all different, of course, but to me that extra 5 minutes (between alarms) is like the sword of Damocles. You know it’s coming, and I can’t settle back down to relax because I know it’s just a matter of minutes before the bliss is over.

So forget snoozing after the alarm. Get up after the first one.

Five minutes.

@elbanditoroso I remember those days. 8½ hours of sleep and waking up with the click of the clock radio.
I use the last set of 5 minutes to exercise and get the blood moving while my joints are all loose and unimpeded by gravity. I move my eyes as far as they will go from side to side, up and down, on the diagonals, and in full circles for about 5 reps each. I need to be in bed to do that or I’d get dizzy.
I don’t know if that makes a difference but I do know I am more flexible and in much better shape than most other guys I know who are my age.
~(They turned into old farts while I remain just as I was when I was 30. :-) )

I have experimented, and found the best range is five to ten minutes. Any longer and I end up sleeping too deeply and wake up feeling rattled and off-balanced mentally. Less than 5 minutes, I wake up knowing that trying to go back to bed is pointless and I get up before the alarm goes off again.

I almost never use alarms anymore, but I wish I had had the option of a 30 minute snooze when I was younger. I never had the opportunity to test it, but I think it would have been good for me.

I guess I am fortunate to be able to fall back to sleep so quickly. I can easily do it within 5 minutes of hitting the pillow. It is a gift.

@LuckyGuy Me too. I think I’m slightly narcoleptic. Lol.

My time in the morning is too short to allow myself to snooze, so I am almost always up at the alarm. I get up at 4:10 a.m.to be at my desk after commute at 6 a.m. And it takes me time over my coffee to wake up.

I am cursed where I wake up 30 seconds before the alarm and am up for the day. In those very rare instances when I do fall back asleep…I find 15 more minutes of sleep is ideal for me.

3–5 hours.
I can’t rely on alarms to wake me up because I will turn them off in my sleep. If I need to be somewhere before 10am, I have to just stay up the entire night or I will never make it to an appointment.

40 minutes.

I set two, one for five min and one for six.

That was interesting @LuckyGuy! I never thought to experiment. I have an old phone set to go off at 3 ten-minutes intervals. The first two alarms are a soft kind of “ding dong.” It’s enough to nudge me awake without pissing me off. (Don’t wake me up unexpectedly when I’m sleeping! The kids had to learn that the hard way. :( :( ) The third one blasts the intro to Tom Sawyer in my ear! I get up.

@cheebdragon I used to do that, and it was imperative that I didn’t! It wasn’t just an apointment. I had to get up for work, a new job. I used to scare the hell out of myself when I woke up a realized I had shut the alarm off. So I set it across the room, so I had to get out of bed to reach it. It worked for me. But I can also see it not working. I’m stubborn about my sleep!

@cheebdragon You can turn off your alarm in your sleep?! Wow! Have you tried putting it across the room?
Do you fall asleep quickly as well?

I can walk around the house when I’m asleep @LuckyGuy. When I was younger. I don’t think I have that problem any more.

@zenvelo The 3 hour time difference works to your advantage. I’ll bet your morning commute traffic is not so bad. Do they let you out early as well?
I noticed the Oscars are on at a more reasonable time when watched while in LA.

@Dutchess_III Walking in your sleep. Yikes! That seems dangerous! Have you seen the Mike Birbiglia show “Sleepwalk with me”.

No I haven’t. It wasn’t really a problem for some reason. However, when I moved into a co-ed dorm in college was just terrified that I’d walk in my sleep! But I never did, as far as I know.

I work from home and I’m an insomniac.

I start work at 6 am. My alarm is set for 5:30. I’ll snooze the first alarm to convince myself the day has started, and I’m usually logging in to work by 5:45.

Coffee happens during my first 15 minute break at 8 am.

However long it takes to smash on the ground after I toss it out the bedroom window

One hour and slowly raise the volume.

I use an alarm feature on average about two or three times a year – most often less than that, even – for when I have to get up especially early to be on time for a special meeting or to catch a morning plane, for example. And those times I generally set the alarm for about a half-hour earlier than I absolutely must arise, then decide when the alarm wakes me whether I want to snooze or not – and generally I choose not to.

Which is not to say I’m an early riser. Given my choice, such as weekends or holidays, I generally prefer to snooze until around 9 AM if the option is available.

However, most days I must arise between 0630 – 0700 to be on time for work (and to have a shower, a few minutes to myself before I leave the house, etc.), so I just wake up at that time. (I also wake up at that time when I don’t “need to”, then roll over and go back to sleep on those cherished days.)

I die when I sleep. My vitals go down to near flatline. I require some time to allow my metabolism to advance, or getting up simply results in me landing on my face.
Snooze has never worked for me. I set my alarm for radio. That gives me somewhere to focus until my blood is circulating.

Nothing. You kick your ass out of that soft bed, punch the ground and break the planet then YOU GET SHIT DONE.

No fan of snooze, here, either. I’m awake 20–30 minutes before the alarm setting, and go-get-em by the alarm.

I do a 5 minute snooze and try to avoid really falling back to sleep, rather I use the 5 minutes to ease into waking. Just once. When my alarm goes off a second time, I get up.

Give me eight hours (almost on the nose) and/or a certain amount of sunlight, and I don’t need a snooze button. Actually, give me one or both of those and I don’t need an alarm at all.

But I don’t usually have one of those options to wake me up, so alarm it is…. and I tend to get used to sounds over time and sleep through them—as sensitive as I am to light, I’m exceptionally good at incorporating sounds into my dreams—so I have two separate alarms, staggered, which sound distinct from one another and from the other noises in my environment. (I can’t, for example, use the sound that I use for the ringtone on my phone because I’ll sleep right through it.)

For now, the second alarm is set 6 minutes after the first, and each has a snooze of 10 minutes, which means my first snooze is 6 minutes, my second snooze is 4 minutes, my third snooze is back to 6 minutes, etc. I find the irregular timing helps to keep me hearing the sounds. It also makes the 6 minutes snoozes feel more satisfying, while making the 4 minute snoozes feel too short, helping to wake me up. It’s a weirdly precise system. For all of that, I only really hit “snooze” 1 or 2 times…. but if I’m worried I’ll have a hard time waking up a certain morning, I’ll set my alarm for half an hour earlier than I need.

For weekends I have a single alarm, different from either weekday alarm, set at either an 8 or 9 minute snooze interval. It feels like having 10 minutes, but if I’m being extremely lazy and hitting snooze 5 times, then I suddenly have an extra 5–10 minutes on my side.

I wake up in the first 20 seconds or less when it comes on. Usually to Moonlight Sonata.

It’s actually a pretty common song in movies, and shows. It always makes me feel weird, because I’m already up. But I hate loud alarms, and have trained my body to awake when I hear the first part of the song.

I’m anomalous in most cases ,in terms of being “normal”/human,so it’s not a surprise.

If I try to “snooze,” I can’t sleep past the initial alarm.

That reminds me, @MrGrimm888, that when I do use my phone as my alarm device, then I wake to Tequila (the song, not the beverage), so when I hear that tune, which is not so frequently played, then I know I should be doing something.

Nice. I prefer a more gentle awakening tune. But good choice. It would probably make me want tequila for breakfast :)

I can actually set my internal alarm so that I wake up just a second before my first alarm goes off. It doesn’t matter what time I set, 5:00 a.m., 6:00 a.m., 6:18 a.m…..doesn’t matter. It’s kind of cool.

When I hear the beginning of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” I jump outta my skin! Even if it’s the middle of the say. Conditioning.

@Dutchess_III
Waking up a few minutes before the alarm is actually the worst thing.
You feel robbed of valuable sleep, and you can not even go back to sleep because in a few minutes you are rippped out of it again.

I don’t do it on purpose. I can’t help it if I wake up. And it’s not minutes before. More like seconds.