Reena Mehra, MD, MS, tells Cleveland Clinic Health Essentials that all of that snoozing isn’t helping our bodies get the restorative sleep that we need.

We all have different arousal thresholds during different stages of sleep, and if we’re disrupting late stage REM sleep, it can cause a ‘fight or flight’ response – which increases our blood pressure and heartbeat, Dr. Mehra says.

Plus, she notes, the short period of sleep that we get in between hitting the snooze button – five, 10 minutes at a time – isn’t restorative sleep.