It turns out hitting the snooze button in the morning actually comes with some benefits.

You might do it a couple of times a morning. Maybe five or six times. Or you might not do it at all (in which case, we’re impressed).

Yep, we’re talking about hitting that snooze button and scoring some precious minutes of extra sleep time.

Thankfully, if you’re a chronic snoozer, we’ve got good news for you.

It turns out hitting the snooze button once or twice in the morning isn’t actually as bad as we initially thought.

Although snoozing has a bad reputation as it can interfere with your body’s natural wake mechanisms, according to a report in INSIDER, snoozing does have some surprising benefits.

Side note – Can too much sleep cause nightmares?

According to psychologist Perpetua Neo, snoozing can actually help consolidate our thoughts and memories.

“The thing about night owls is our REM sleep is very important, and REM sleep happens in the last two hours,” she explained.

“If you allow yourself 20 minutes to snooze, between your first and second alarms, what that does is it gives your brain time to consolidate the rest of your REM sleep.”

Neo added that having that extra boost of sleep can also help aid creativity.

“If your brain is consolidating and restoring you might actually get really creative,” she explained.

“You might drift off with a really brilliant idea, and what you can do then is to jot down your dreams and thoughts, rather than checking Instagram and Facebook first thing.”

Science has said that you can’t actually turn into a morning person if you aren’t already…

Neo is not the first to preach the benefits of hitting the snooze button.

David Dinges, chief of the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology at the University of Pennsylvania explained that the snooze button is a great tool for allowing yourself more time to wake up.

“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 told The Wall Street Journal.

But while snoozing might help, Dinges admitted it’s not the best habit.

“You’d be better off getting that extra 10 to 20 minutes of real sleep rather than doing that dance with the alarm clock,” he said.