Going back to sleep for a few minutes in the morning? Not so bad according to Swedish researchers whose study reveals some benefits to morning sleepiness. While for many the "snooze" button on the alarm clock evokes complicated mornings, these researchers from Stockholm University noted that few studies have looked at the morning alarm clock and therefore conducted two studies made public on Wednesday.
The first focused on the profile of users of the snooze function, with a questionnaire of 1,732 people. "We found that young people in general were the snooze users and that they were night owls," said Tina Sundelin, a sleep researcher at Stockholm University, calling the finding unsurprising. While feeling tired is the most common reason, some responded that staying in bed for a few minutes longer felt like "a luxury."
"Better performance in some tests"
The second study looked at the impact of falling asleep in the morning, via 31 people subjected to different situations: uninterrupted sleep and immediate wake-up, or first waking up half an hour before actually getting up.
"What's interesting is that those who used the snooze slept only six minutes less than those who didn't on average," Sundelin said, concluding that they largely fell asleep within half an hour of getting up.
They were then subjected to cognitive tests such as math or a memory test. Despite interrupted sleep at the end of the night, there was no real difference in the feeling of fatigue or in the tests. "They even performed better in some tests," the researcher adds, concluding that "the clearest effect (of going back to sleep in the morning) is that it's not negative."