The real reason your iPhone snooze alarm is 9 minutes will blow your mind
It dates back to way before Apple was established
Featured Image Credit: thianchai sitthikongsak/milorad kravic/Getty Images
There is a real reason why your iPhone snooze alarm is nine minutes long and it’ll blow your mind.
If you’re not a morning person then you’ll know the struggle of hitting the snooze button five times before dragging yourself out of bed.
Maybe you’re someone who has 15 different alarms on your phone in the morning.
Advert
But have you ever wondered why hitting the snooze button gives you exactly nine more minutes of peace?
It seems like 10 minutes would make more sense but the number wasn’t chosen at random.
The answer dates back long before the iPhone or even Apple was a thing.
Back in 1956, when snooze buttons were first introduced to alarm clocks, General Electric-Telechron’s Snooz-Alarm joined the market.
For this particular model, the snooze lasted for nine minutes - and there was a reason for it.
It was largely down to the fact that it was impossible to get the gear teeth in the clock to line up for exactly 10 minutes so it would also be slightly before or later.
And apparently, a nine minute snooze is better for people than 10 minutes.
Holly Schiff, who is a licensed clinical psychologist based in Greenwich, Connecticut, said: “In terms of sleep, nine minutes is just enough time for a brief rest; however, once you get past the ten-minute mark, your body can start to fall back into a deep sleep, which will make waking up again difficult and more unpleasant.”
The timings stuck and it has been used by Apple since they launched the first iPhone back in 2007.
Of course nowadays, there are no gear teeth to grapple with when setting the snooze time.
But surprisingly, there isn’t actually any way to change the amount of time the snooze button has on an iPhone.
There is sort of a way round this - you can set multiple alarms at different intervals to sleep for the amount of time you want.
According to the expert, getting in those extra few minutes of sleep can actually be detrimental to the rest of the day.
Schiff said: “When we doze off for those extra minutes, we are preparing our bodies for another sleep cycle, which then becomes quickly interrupted, and therefore we feel fatigued for the rest of the day.”
She also warned that waking up like that repeatedly can cause some strain on our nervous and cardiovascular systems.