Blaming a pet for something isn’t out of the ordinary—take the classic “my dog ate my homework” excuse. But in this case, one woman claimed her cat was turning off her alarm.
Skeptical, her roommate decided to test whether it was really true. The experiment quickly went viral on TikTok (@maviskipling), racking up 5.2 million views.
The footage shows an alarm going off on an iPhone, with a gray cat instantly jumping up and using its paws to turn it off.
The woman repeats the test multiple times, switching to different alarm melodies each time—and the cat responds the same way on every attempt.
“Why does she hate alarms so much,” reads the text over the video, which has nearly 900,000 likes at the time of writing.
Why Snoozing Disrupts Sleep
While the video amused viewers, experts warn that repeatedly hitting the snooze button can be harmful.
Researchers from Mass General Brigham analyzed sleep data from more than 21,000 people worldwide using the Sleep Cycle app, covering roughly 3 million nights.
They found the snooze button was used on nearly 56 percent of mornings. Almost half of participants hit snooze on more than 80 percent of days, with heavy snoozers spending an average of 20 extra minutes in bed each morning.
According to lead author Rebecca Robbins, PhD, from the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders Medicine at Brigham, the issue with snoozing is that it interrupts some of the most important stages of sleep—particularly rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which occurs in the hours before waking.
She said hitting snooze often breaks up this deep, restorative sleep and replaces it with lighter sleep.
Her advice is to set an alarm for the latest possible time and get out of bed as soon as it goes off. Doing so can improve sleep quality and how a person feels the next day—or, in this case, ensure a pet isn’t nearby to turn it off.
TikTok Reacts
Viewers flooded the comments with theories and jokes.
One user wrote: “She loves her human and doesn’t want her to leave. Cats recognize patterns. If your roommates cat regularly sees this noise wake him/her up and then he/she leaves her, cat is smart enough to stop noise. Solves the problem for cat, human has to stay.”
“I would show this to my boss so fast,” said another.
A third joked: “Sorry I am late again my cat turned off my alarms.”
Related Articles
