The snooze alarm: We love it, we hate it, we blame it for why we're actually more tired than if we'd actually just bothered to get up when our alarm went off in the first place.


But it turns out the snooze alarm isn't actually as bad for you as was once thought. It's all about how you use it. David Dinges, chief of the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks that the snooze alarm should be used -- but only once a morning.

"Snoozing is not a great evil," he said. "The extra 10 minutes you get by snoozing can actually help to gently awaken the mind, rather than jolt it back to wakefulness." Dinges recommends that if you're going to play the snooze game, you should simply set your alarm for ten or twenty minutes earlier than you might ordinarily set it, so that you've got a built in snooze time buffer. But make sure to factor in ample sleeping time, because anytime after your first alarm goes off isn't like your uninterrupted sleep. "It feels like a blissful dream state because the closer you get to wakening, the more rapid-eye movement and dreams occur." [Wall Street Journal]