Listen to enough productivity podcasters, and it’s tempting to believe that napping is a superpower: not just a sticking plaster after poor sleep, but a path towards enhanced cognition, a brighter outlook and maybe improved athletic performance. Professional athletes are all at it – and so are concert pianists, UFC champions and media moguls. However, if you haven’t got a room for napping or employment that allows frequent naps, is it *truly* worthwhile perks to a burst of shut-eye to justify the hassle? Does there exist a dependable method to nod off promptly? Plus, is it possible to really guarantee you will get up feeling improved, instead of groggy?
Exploring Your Reasons for Napping
“We can identify three main reasons for daytime sleep in the adult population,” notes a professor of sleep science specialist. “The first is what we call make-up sleep, that is what you do following poor sleep overnight. Secondly, there's preparatory napping, when you are anticipating insufficient sleep ahead, for example when working graveyard shifts. The third reason is “pleasure-based sleep”, which essentially comes down to the wish: there is an opportunity to doze in the daytime, and it's pleasant to nap.”
The first thing to undertake, then, is to examine why you want to nap. “Naps can be genuinely useful when overnight rest gets interrupted due to causes beyond your control – for example, when you are a parent of a newborn, or if you are healing after being ill or heavy physical exertion,” states a sleep physiologist. “Yet when you take a nap as your sleep at night seems unreliable or unreliable, that is frequently a signal your body's sleep pressure is not as strong as it should be. In those cases, naps can become part of the issue, rather than the answer. Use napping for brief periods for temporary issues – the focus should still be a strong and predictable overnight rest.”
The Optimal Snooze Time
This means that napping must not be long enough to affect your sleep at night, and ideally shouldn’t take place in the late afternoon (contingent on the time you go to bed at night). What duration is wise? Guidelines are mixed. In one of the most referenced research about napping, experts found that astronauts showed up to a 54% increase in alertness and a 34% increase in task performance after a 26-minute nap (in detail, this included an initial six-minute nodding-off period). “My advice is setting a timer for 20 to 30 minutes – many individuals are asleep quickly,” notes a sleep coach. “You'll find much advice around concerning the ideal number for sleeping, but that tends to make people feel more stressed above all – and the least helpful action one can do while aiming to fall asleep is worry about it.”
Should you decide to sleep for longer, steer clear of the period between 45 and 60 minutes that induces sleep grogginess, that disoriented sensation when you wake. “The science would say it’s better to take a longer nap of one to one and a half hours than a medium-length one,” explains the professor. “45 minutes is long enough to send you into slow-wave sleep and it is more probable to feel sluggish upon awakening – while if you nap for slightly longer to an hour or 90 minutes, it's likely you'll to be completing of a sleep cycle and will probably get up feeling more alert. But if you're dozing for an hour and a half, it can influence the quality of your sleep later that night.”
Creating an Ideal Snooze Setting
As for exact methodologies, suggestions are diverse. Certain specialists propose employing similar routines you use to foster a good night’s sleep: a quiet room, a cozy bed and maximum darkness as you can manage. Others suggest that it's fine to merely snooze on the sofa with ambient lighting happens to be around – to prevent sleep inertia and to preserve your bed as the space your brain links with proper sleep. “Napping is quite challenging to will,” says a sleep coach. “Without any drowsiness, it becomes harder to recline and practically tell yourself to fall asleep. There must be a natural inclination available to initiate sleep initially. I can usually snooze in broad daylight and naturally wake up without a timer, though, what aids many individuals is to look for a time when they are naturally slightly tired and then simply ease into sleep.”
It’s worth experimenting, and should your choices are limited – for example, if attempting to grab a quick nap while traveling or at the office – it's acceptable with bringing a few tools. “Coaching elite athletes, I recommend that they avoid becoming accustomed to sleeping in their bed, since they’re going to have|they will
