For many, sleep is the best part of the day, so, what better news this Christmas than knowing that hitting the snooze button might not be so bad for you after all?
Research has found more people vow to get more sleep for their new year’s resolution than vow to get to the gym, with many valuing getting a few extra hours kip over losing a few extra pounds around the waistline. Getting more sleep does, of course, help with weight loss anyway, along with helping to manage stress and to boost our mood, our productivity, our cognitive function, and our immune system.
But, perversely, sleeping too much can lead to weight gain, depression, diabetes, and heart disease to name but a few. The general consensus is that seven hours sleep is the optimum amount for most adults, and it should be a steady seven hours per night rather than attempting to make up for missed slumber with lie-ins.
It’s estimated that a whopping 70% of us use the snooze button, but the general consensus has been that it should also be avoided, as then-director of Sleep Disorders Research, Dr Reena Mehra, explains to the Cleveland Clinic. “Much of the latter part of our sleep cycle is comprised of REM sleep, or dream sleep, which is a restorative sleep state,” she says. “And so, if you’re hitting the snooze button, then you’re disrupting that REM sleep.”
It’s been argued that fragmented sleep is worse for us than short, uninterrupted sleep, more likely to have an adverse effect on our cognitive function, mood, and attention span; that prolonging the alarm confuses our circadian rhythm, making our body unsure as to whether it should be sleeping or getting up. (Plus, if you are feeling the urge to ‘snooze’ then you’re probably not getting enough sleep to start with.)
Studies have found that those who do use snooze are likely to be younger than non-snoozers, more likely to feel drowsier when waking, and more likely to be night owls.
However, recent research has found that choosing those few extra bursts of blissful shuteye has zero impact on sleep quality. Research published in the Journal of Sleep found that shortly after waking, those who’d snoozed for 30 minutes outperformed those who’d risen on the first alarm when doing mathematical equations and memory tests. Differences in mood, cognition, and tiredness between the two groups were slight as the day wore on.
Studies have found that those who do use snooze are likely to be younger than non-snoozers, more likely to feel drowsier when waking, and more likely to be night owls. The main reason for choosing snooze was the inability to wake up and feeling too tired. Also common is the enjoyment of waking up more gradually.
“People who snooze for 30 minutes are actually falling back to sleep between alarms,” Marie-Pierre St-Onge, the director of the Center of Excellence for Sleep and Circadian Research at Columbia University, tells NBC. “Not a deep sleep but a light sleep so that when they had to wake up at the end of 30 minutes they were not being yanked out of a deeper stage of sleep. They might have felt this was a more gentle awakening.”
Aaron Striegel, a professor of computer science at Notre Dame, who co-authored one of the studies, says that their research reveals that snoozing has been “unfairly villainised”. “That was our big takeaway,” he tells Time. “It’s probably not as bad as what they’re telling you.”
