World Sleep Day 2019: Snoozing May Lead to Heart Problems and Weight Gain

We are a sleep deprived generation. We take pride in the fact that we are too busy to sleep. We know those all-night Netflix and Chill-marathons aren’t helping us at all. We’re all guilty of cutting down on sleep. With crazy work hours, long commutes, social media and the overwhelming number of things to do, why would we waste our time sleeping, right? Well, our fumbling fingers that reach out for the snooze button every morning would disagree.Maybe five minutes more? Just another ten minutes. Please? It’ll give me the rest I need.To start with, we need to stop feeding this mantra to our sleepy selves. Hitting the snooze button is quite harmful for the heart, according to a recent study. Neuroscientists have gone to the extent of terming it “cardiovascular assault”, according to The Independent.Research published in the Industrial Health Journal in 2005 warns that when we’re jolted from sleep, the body goes into a fight-or-flight mode stemmed in the nervous system. This, in turn, accelerates the blood pressure and the heart rate.Professor Matthew Walker, who teaches at the University of California’s Centre for Human Sleep Science, warns that a sudden alarm to wake one up from deep sleep is as it is bad for the heart. Add to it some snoozing and voila! You’ve just arrived at the unhealthy-heart party.If alarming your heart, quite literally, were not bad enough, using the snooze feature means you will repeatedly inflict that cardiovascular assault again and again within a short span of time.Dr Matthew Walker to The IndependentAs if an Unhealthy Heart Wasn’t Enough, Add Weight Gain to the EquationWeight gain is one of the many negative effects of hitting snooze, Dr David Dinges, a sleep scientist at the University of Pennsylvania told The Week.In studies in our lab, we’ve seen sleep restriction lead to weight gain. Other studies have shown a connection between reduced sleep time and morbidity illness such as diabetes and heart disease.Dr David DingesHowever, Dr Dinges, also pointed out that snoozing might not be so bad. “Snoozing is not a great evil. The extra 10 minutes you get by snoozing can actually help to gently awaken the mind, rather than jolt it back to wakefulness,” he was quoted as saying.While sleep experts continue to be divided on the way snoozing affects your body, most still link it to cardiovascular problems and weight gain, along with diabetes and problems of the nervous system That’s probably why sleep scientists all over say it is better to go to bed a little earlier than usual and to get out of bed when the alarm goes off for the first time.We don’t want to rain on the snoozing parade which, after all, is quite a comforting experience. And indeed we do spend a third of our lives sleeping. The choice, however, here is between what seem like short term and long term gains.(Have you subscribed to FIT’s newsletter yet? Click here and get health updates directly in your inbox.)

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Is Hitting the Snooze Button An ‘Assault’ on Your Heart?

If you care about the health of your heart (and weight gain), stop hitting the snooze button every morning.

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Topics: World Sleep Day Insomnia Sleep