If you're someone who likes to hit the snooze button in the morning, this will come as good news. According to new research from Stockholm University in Sweden, snoozing through your alarm and nodding off for more sleep is not a bad thing when it comes to the quality of sleep. Professor Annie Curtis, body clock expert at the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences joined RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime to explain all about it. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full on Drivetime)
"We're talking about the snoozing in the morning that many of us engage in, it's hitting the snooze button multiple times. The question that they had first of all was, how many of us actually do snooze? And the answer to that is a lot of us: up to 70% of us snooze.
I thought snoozing was bad for me?
"That's what most people would think. Most people would think that it would affect the quality of your sleep, but actually the research says differently. So what they did was, they looked at everyone who was a snoozer and they took those into the lab. Then they actually had those people either wake up at one time or snooze for 30 minutes - which is kind of about the time that we do it, don't we? Then what they looked at was their cognitive function - basically, how well they can think and how well they can function - and the individuals who snoozed actually had higher cognitive function than those who didn't," explains Curtis.
The research also showed that their sleep quality was pretty much on par with those who don't snooze.
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From the RTÉ Brainstorm podcast, The A to Zzzzz of Sleep
What about the sleep cycle?
"One of the things that helped the snoozers, is that it doesn't bolt you out of that deep sleep. So it allows you to sort of gradually step up out of that deep sleep and that can actually be quite restorative and good for you, so I think that's one of the reasons."
"What they found out in this study was that night owls - which kind of makes more sense - are much more likely to snooze, because they're the individuals who really tend to have a later body clock, they want to wake up later in the morning. They also found out that younger individuals tended to be snoozers as well. That makes sense because - I don't know if you have a teenager in the house - for those individuals, they don't like going to bed, they want to go to bed quite late, they want to sleep in in the morning. So they tend to be snoozers as well," says Curtis. "In this study, the average age was 27, so it's a young cohort."
The message? Snooze in tomorrow morning.
