This is why hitting the snooze button is bad for your health

Five more minutes. Just 300 more seconds of slumber.

It's not going to hurt anyone, is it? Especially when getting back into the routine of early mornings following your festive fun.

Wrong. So very wrong. Hitting that snooze body can actually play havoc with your body's internal workings, as this latest video from AsapSCIENCE explains.

The human body has chemicals in place to not only put us to sleep, but wake us up too. While you’re still drooling over the pillow, the body is preparing an hour before you naturally wake up, as your temperature rises, sleep becomes lighter and hormones such as dopamine and cortisol are released, giving you the requisite burst of energy to start your day. However, early alarms can interrupt this and cause havoc with these internal processes, cutting them short.

So as you attempt to cash in on an perceived extra 10 minutes slumber, your body may well be in danger of restarting its sleep cycle, and making you doubly tired when you wake up.   

Not only that, the video also suggests that the more you make your sleep cycle less predictable to your brain, the higher chance you’ll have of fractured sleep patterns in general.  

From the intimate workings of your biological clock (not the broody kind) to the hormones that help fuel your sleep, the next two minutes and 20 seconds are about to change your bedtime habits, and prove that if you snooze, you lose...