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Sleeping is not losing, as people who regularly hit the snooze button may be more mentally alert when they finally get up.
The most common reason people give for resetting their alarm and taking a nap is that they are too tired to wake up, a study of more than 1,700 people found.
Scientists conclude that a nap can therefore combat “sleep inertia”, sleep’s struggle to get mentally going in the morning.
Evidence for this came from 31 people who were given permission to set an alarm half an hour before they actually needed to wake up and hit the snooze button three times.
After doing this and after sleeping until the same time, they were tested on their memory, simple mathematical additions and a confusing mental task.
The most common reason people give for resetting their alarm and taking a nap is that they are too tired to wake up, a study of more than 1,700 people found. Scientists conclude that a nap can therefore combat “sleep inertia”, sleep’s struggle to get mentally going in the morning.
The volunteers, who were habitual sleepers, performed better on three out of four tests after they were allowed to sleep, suggesting that resetting the alarm made them mentally sharper.
Sleep trackers showed that a snooze snooze made people less likely to have to get up after deep sleep, which can reduce brain fog.
Surprisingly, despite spending 30 minutes sleeping with alarm interruptions, the sleepers actually slept for about 23 minutes.
However, the researchers caution that their study is small and that morning benefits can only be seen in people who regularly hit the snooze button.
They tend to be younger people and night owls, who potentially go to bed later, so they even benefit from extra interrupted sleep in the morning.
Dr Tina Sundelin, who led the Stockholm University study, said: “The findings indicate that there is no reason to stop sleeping in the morning if you enjoy it, at least not during nap times of around 30 minutes.” .
“In fact, it may even help those with morning sleepiness be a little more awake once they get up.”
The study, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, presents the results of an online questionnaire completed by 1,732 people in Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland and Australia.
It showed that more than two-thirds of people set multiple alarms or snoozed the alarm at least sometimes.
These sleepyheads were almost four times more likely to say they were night owls than people who never slept, and on average six years younger than non-sleepers.
The researchers recruited 31 people who slept at least twice a week to compare their mental abilities after falling asleep or having to wake up at the first alarm.
After sleeping, people performed better on a mental arithmetic test, which asked them to add numbers quickly and accurately, compared to when they slept until the alarm.
They performed better on a memory test in which they were asked to recognize words they had been shown previously.
A repeat also meant that people did better on a complicated test in which they had to name the color a word was written in, such as blue, even if the word itself was “red.”
After pressing the repeat button, volunteers completed this difficult task more quickly after previously seeing a color word written in the same color.
However, sleep made no difference in a working memory test, where people had to remember the point at which a box on a grid flashed red.
The apparent benefits of staying in bed after the first alarm had also disappeared by lunchtime, when people took the tests again.
When asked about sleepiness and mood, sleep was not found to make people less sleepy or more cheerful.
In fact, the 31 sleepyheads who were monitored in the lab tended to have lighter sleep after resetting the alarm compared to the late sleepers.
But despite having to wake up to hit the snooze button every 10 minutes, the effects on overall sleep quality were not significant.