He thought he was just tired from a busy schedule. His wife needed to be up by 6:30 a.m. His own alarm didn’t go off until 7:45. The gap seemed manageable. Then he looked at her phone.
Under the username u/Cautious-Extreme-208, the man posted to social media on February 11, 2026, explaining what he found: not one alarm, but a chain of them, programmed at five-minute intervals from 6 a.m. to 6:45 a.m. Nine separate alarms. Each one nudging him slightly further from sleep before he had any reason to be awake. He called the screenshot he shared the “dark truth” behind his wife’s morning routine. The post has since been deleted, but not before Newsweek picked it up and the comment section filled with people saying some version of the same thing: same. Same house, same problem.
A 2025 study from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, published in Nature, analyzed more than 3 million nights of sleep data from users of a sleep monitoring app and found that more than half of all sleep sessions, 55.6%, ended with a snooze alarm. The average snoozer hit the button 2.4 times per morning, for a total of about 11 minutes of fragmented half-sleep. The researchers described frequent snooze alarm use as a potential marker of poor sleep health overall, and recommended that people set their alarm for the latest realistic wake time rather than building in a buffer of repeated alerts.
The logic makes sense once you understand what the alarm is actually interrupting. Sleep in the final hour or two before waking tends to include some of the most important rest your brain gets, the kind that consolidates memory, processes emotion, and leaves you feeling human. Every alarm that fires before you need to be up pulls you partially out of that state. Not enough to wake you, but enough to disrupt it. Multiply that by nine alarms over 45 minutes and you have a pretty efficient system for making two people feel worse than they should.
That said, the science isn’t entirely one-sided. A 2024 study published in the Journal of Sleep Research found that for habitual late sleepers, a brief snooze period of around 30 minutes actually improved cognitive performance on rising compared to an abrupt awakening, and helped prevent being jolted out of the deepest stages of sleep. The key word there is brief. A single snooze as a gentle transition is a different thing from a 45-minute chain of beeps every five minutes.
Back on Reddit, the responses ranged from sympathetic to practical. u/One_Anything_2279 related immediately, joking about his own earlier-rising wife: “I hope she doesn’t find this and think this is my post.” u/Tempyteacup was blunt about the habit: “genuinely really bad for your sleep,” they wrote, recommending one alarm set for the time you actually need to get up. u/RefuseMysterious513 mentioned using apps that require solving a math problem before the alarm stops, a trick that forces full wakefulness. u/MJR-WaffleCat kept it simple: phone across the room.
None of those solutions address the underlying issue, which is that two people sharing a bed with an hour-plus difference in their wake times are always going to need some negotiation. The alarms are almost beside the point. What the post really captured is the small, daily math of living with another person’s schedule, and how much it costs you in sleep before you even realize it’s happening.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
