James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Many sleep experts take a dim view of using the snooze button in the morning. Setting serial alarms beginning earlier than you need to get up, rather than sleeping straight through until a single alarm, may prematurely pull you out of deep, restorative sleep, the thinking goes. And if you’re snoozing beyond the time you actually meant to get out of bed, that may be a signal that you’re not getting enough rest at night, says Philip Cheng, a sleep expert at Henry Ford Health.

But when Stephen Mattingly—a serial snoozer who completed his Ph.D. in cognition at the University of Notre Dame and then became a postdoctoral researcher at the university—turned to the scientific literature to see if the data backed up those warnings, he couldn’t find much.

Previous studies had found that fragmented sleep at night is worse than short but uninterrupted sleep, and, more positively, that napping may reverse some of the damage associated with sleep deprivation (and potentially also improve heart health). But neither nighttime slumber nor daytime napping is exactly the same as snoozing first thing in the morning.

Some of the only snoozing-specific research Mattingly could find linked snooze-button use to increased chances of lucid dreaming, but he was more interested in the day-to-day health effects of the habit. So he designed a study using both survey and wearable-device data to assess the science of snoozing.

The results, published in the journal Sleep in 2022, suggested that snoozers didn’t sleep less overall or report feeling more fatigued throughout the day than people who got up after one alarm. Snoozers did, however, tend to experience lighter sleep, especially in the hour before waking, and had elevated resting heart rates relative to non-snoozers—results that suggest their stress responses kicked into gear before waking.

That may sound like a bad thing, but the body has a stress system for a reason, Mattingly says. In this context, he says, it may help shake off “sleep inertia,” or the grogginess many people feel after waking, and promote alertness and cognitive function.

.

Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________