Everything you ever wanted to know about your "snooze" button.




Did you know that your snooze button on your alarm clock is only 9 minutes long? Curious as to how they got to 9 minutes? Well by the time the snooze feature was added in the 1950’s, the innards of alarm clocks had long been standardized. This meant that the teeth on the snooze gear had to mesh with the existing gear configuration, leaving engineers with a single choice: They could set the snooze for either a little more than nine minutes, or a little more than 10 minutes. But because reports indicated that 10 minutes was too long, allowing people to fall back into a “deep” sleep, clock makers decided on the nine-minute gear, believing people would wake up easier and happier after a shorter snooze. We’d tend to disagree with that logic, but, then, we must be in the lazy minority. Although today’s digital clocks can be programmed to have a snooze of any length, most stick with nine minutes because that’s what consumers expect.

If you smack a snooze button, you ain't sleepin' alone. According to USA Today, more than a third of American adults hit the snooze button every morning an average of three times. Snooziest group? The 25- to 34-year-olds - 57 percent of them hit the snooze button daily. Peppiest risers? It's the seniors. Only 10 percent of Americans over 65 regularly use their snooze button.

Snooze alarms can do more than just make you late for work. They can train you to remember your dreams. See, early morning is heavy rapid-eye-movement time, when we dream heavily. The snooze alarm can be your guide in and out of that dreamscape, as you might have noticed on a morning when you hit the snooze button several times.

Charles McPhee, the nationally syndicated columnist and radio host known as "The Dream Doctor," says if you can't remember your dreams you can try this exercise.

On a morning when you can sleep in, set your alarm and when it sounds, hit the snooze alarm. Lie still and work back in your mind to what you were just dreaming about. Remember your emotions and whatever snippets of the dream you can. See if you can piece together the outline of a dream, and write it in a notebook by your bed. Then go back to sleep and repeat the process each time the snooze alarm buzzes.

This can train your mind to better remember your dreams, McPhee says.

SOURCES: Clock historian Jay "Pappy" Kennan, clockhistory.com, USA Today, The Straight Dope



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