I’m an unreformed snoozer; I hit the snooze button constantly in the morning. My “gain” is a series of nine minute naps, until I finally get up.
But I don’t get up, necessarily, because I feel more rested; I usually get up because I have to get going to make it to work. My question is, do the minutes I’m asleep between slapping the snooze button really provide me with any benefit? I figure I’m not slipping into REM sleep or anything else.
Sua
My WAG based on a lot of researching for sleep disorders is that no, it doesn’t help. Your brain needs to fully delve into all levels of sleep to become rested.
The short amount of time between snooze alarms doesn’t allow you to fall into REM sleep, so your brain is not getting any more rest.
I too have difficulty overcoming the inertia of sleep, and while it’s oh-so satisfying to hit the snooze and doze back off, I usually feel better when I don’t. For some reason the few extra minutes of interrupted sleep makes me feel groggier in the morning and less well-rested throughout the day.
I still can’t help myself, though.
I too heard that it doesn’t help, actually IIRC it hurts but this was maybe 10 years ago, perhaps humans have evolved since then.
Let me chime in with agreement here, everything I have read about sleep indicates you need to get some solid REM sleep before it really helps you feel rested. Still, it may help mentally knowing you have just 9 more minutes to indulge…sometimes you’re just not ready to get up yet. 
XJETGIRL is entirely correct, based on what I recall from the Sleep and Dreams course I completed in college.
FWIW, I use the alarm clock as little as possible. I get to bed early enough so that I can awaken naturally when my body is ready to wake. I believe that to be one reason why I am one of the most youthful-looking 51-year-old males in the world.
Cite?
Whether it helps or not - I Love to do it. Nothing starts off a day like 10 naps of (almost) exactly 7 minutes each!
Only soggy bread, hitler, saddam etc… are worse than staying up after the first wake.
I set my clock up to an hour eariler than I am due to get up. so that I can have the naps.
I have to disagree with some of the points raised here. I’ll fetch a cite in a minute.
But some recent research shows that Stage 4 sleep, not just REM sleep, is extremely important to feeling rested. Stage 4 sleep occurs in the last half of the night. Furthermore, you can go quickly from being awake to any stage of sleep, depending on you and your particular circadian rhythms.
So YES, it is possible that snoozing a little more can help a lot.
"The effect of an early rising on alertness was also investigated in the laboratory. This study also investigated whether a short nap (30 minutes) would compensate for an early rising. The advanced time of rising (04.00h) reduced TST {Total Sleep Time} to approx. 4 hours and strongly increased daytime sleepiness as measured by performance, subjective ratings and electrophysiological variables. The short nap yielded 19.8 min. of sleep *and eliminated the effects of the early rising. *
http://www.phs.ki.se/ipm/publications/252Sum.html
I’m still looking for other references that I recall reading…
Okay, I mis-spoke when I said that Stage 4 sleep occurs in the last half of the night. I read one study that showed that the deepest slow wave sleep occurs later in the night, towards morning. The study that I’m recalling found that caffeine, with a half-life of about 7 hours, can decrease the deepest sleep and reduce your sense of being refreshed.
I find that if I am awakened 30 minutes too soon, that I feel lousy for the rest of the day.
I hit the snooze button as well. I have no cite, but I don’t believe it is a bad thing to gradually get out of a lying, sleeping condition. The first alarm wakes you up. The secod reminds you to get out of bed.
I have one of those alarm clocks that has a light on it that comes on 30 minutes before the alarm goes off. The light starts off dim, and gradually gets brighter until the apointed time. I find that this greatly helps me to get up, the light seems to prime me to wake up gradually. I highly recommend this for anyone who is a snooze alarm adict like I used to be.
Besides, little is more annoying than being jolted awake by a screeching clock in the A.M. blackness.
Well, I guess if I have a big glass of iced tea before I go to bed, then wake up and hit the snooze alarm a great many times before rising, I’m pretty screwed, huh?
Thaumaturge, is it called The Sun, by any chance? 
Oh man, you only get 7 minutes? We get 9 over here!
I have my clock set 18 minutes ahead.:o
I’ve been snooze alarming since before they were popularly available (I think the first was 1959, but they were not widely seen until the early '70s). In the early '60s, I maintained two alarms, with a ten minute spread.
Since the beginning, my take has been that the concept was to ease your transition from knocked out to being awake, rather than packing in a few more REMs. That’s still my take.
And the third, and the fourth, and the fifth…
Of course, my alarm clock only gives me four minutes…
Are product recommendations allowed on these boards? Can you tell me the name of such a delightful object? I’m a total snooze button addict - I’ve gradually worked my way up to about an hour and a half of snoozing every morning and it’s really a problem, but one I don’t seem to be able to get over.
xvxdarkknightxvx- Waiting for the sun to get up is the ideal solution of course. Support me for supreme dictator of the earth, and I’ll make it illegal for any company to require someone to get up before the sun. 
jacquilynne- I don’t know if product recommendations are illegal or not, if they are, feel free to edit this mods. My alarm clock is made by a company called Soleil, called a sun alarm. I’ve seen other ones in those fancy tech catalogs since I bought mine a few years ago, that had digital faces instead of the analog one this has. I’d actually recommend looking for and getting one of those, since the one I has is impossible to read in the dark, so I have a regular alarm clock underneath it so I can tell the time at night. 