Many people go back to sleep shortly after being awakened by their alarm ringing in the morning, in order to grab a few extra minutes of sleep. A habit which would present certain advantages according to two recent studies, which were made public on Wednesday October 18, 2023, as relayed byAFP. Led by Swedish researchers from Stockholm University, the two studies in question highlighted the benefits of morning sleepiness. The first study looked at the profile of users of the snooze function on alarm clocks, better known as “snooze”. Swedish scientists asked 1,732 people to complete a questionnaire on this subject. “We found that generally young people were the snooze users and that they were night owls”, underlined Tina Sundelin, sleep researcher at Stockholm University. The majority of respondents answered that they use the snooze button in the morning because of the feeling of tiredness they feel when they wake up.
Morning sleepiness: no negative effect on cognitive performance
Furthermore, some of them indicated that they felt like “a luxury” staying in bed a few minutes longer in the morning. For its part, the second study evaluated the impact of morning sleepiness. For this, 31 people were subjected to different situations: uninterrupted sleep and immediate rising, or first awakening half an hour before actually getting up. “What’s interesting is that those who used snooze slept only six minutes less than others on average.”, explained Tina Sundelin. All participants in this scientific study were then subjected to cognitive tests, such as mathematics, or a memory test. In the end, no real difference in the feeling of fatigue, or in the tests, was noted between people whose sleep was interrupted by immediately getting up, and those who went back to sleep for half an hour after hearing their alarm clock ringing. “They even performed better in some tests”finally concluded the Swedish researcher, before specifying that “the clearest effect (of morning sleepiness, editor’s note) is that it is not negative.”