You know the feeling: It’s Monday morning, your alarm has just gone off, but your bed has never felt comfier. The thought of the weekend being over and having to head off to work shortly makes you want to dive deeper under your covers. You’d do anything to just get a few extra minutes of sleep so you can put off the start of Monday as long as you can. The alarm is blaring and you reach over and hit snooze…. time to head back to sleep.

Hitting snooze is probably one of our favourite things to do. Yes, it gives you a few stolen moments of sleep before you have to face reality, but there are actually a number of negative effects. The next time you try to steal an extra five minutes, consider these facts:

1. The saying “You snooze, you lose” is actually true – you’re setting yourself up to be more tired during the day. If you go back to sleep and enter a new sleep cycle, you won’t have enough time to finish it, which leaves you feeling groggy and tired

2. Maybe you need to go to bed earlier. Consider what time you’re going to bed, if you find that you’re hitting snooze every single morning, you’re probably not getting enough sleep. Turn in earlier and you’ll find that you won’t be tempted to hit snooze

3. You’re throwing off your internal clock – Waking up at 6:30am one day and 7:00am the next is not good for your body. Your internal clock will not know when to feel sleepy, which leads to you staying up later at night and consequently feeling sleepier in the morning