Listen to plenty of self-improvement gurus, and you'll be tempting to believe that napping is a secret weapon: more than a band-aid after restless night, but a shortcut to improved recall, a brighter outlook and maybe a faster 5k run time. Premier League soccer players are all at it – along with concert pianists, UFC champions and business leaders. However, if you lack a room for napping or a job that allows frequent naps, are there *really* sufficient advantages to a quick nap to merit the kerfuffle? Does there exist a dependable method to get to sleep quickly enough? Plus, is it possible to really guarantee you will arise feeling refreshed, rather than worse?
Exploring The Reasons for Napping
“Experts note three key drivers for taking a nap in the adult population,” explains an expert sleep and circadian science researcher. “The first is what we call make-up sleep, which is what happens after experiencing a lack of sleep overnight. Another is prophylactic napping, when you are anticipating insufficient sleep coming up, for instance when working on night shifts. Finally, there's “hedonic napping”, which basically is about desire: there is an opportunity to nap in the daytime, and it feels nice to nap.”
The initial step to undertake, so, is to examine your reason for napping. “Naps can be genuinely useful when overnight rest gets interrupted because of factors outside your control – such as, if you’re a parent of a newborn, or you’re recovering from illness or heavy physical exertion,” states a sleep physiologist. “But if you take a nap because your night sleep feels fragile or poor, that is frequently an indicator your sleep drive is not as strong as required. In those cases, naps can become a contributing factor, instead of the fix. Employ naps as a temporary measure for short-term problems – the main goal ought to remain a strong and predictable overnight rest.”
The Ideal Nap Length
Therefore that naps shouldn’t be long enough to interfere with your nighttime sleep, and best shouldn’t take place post-3 p.m. (contingent on when you retire in the evening). What's a reasonable length? Recommendations vary. From the most-cited studies about napping, researchers at Nasa discovered that space travelers showed improvements of over 50% in attentiveness and a 34% boost in task performance following a nap of 26 minutes (technically, this counted a six-minute sleep onset time). “My advice is using an alarm for half an hour or less – most people are asleep in under ten minutes,” explains a sleep expert. “There’s a lot of advice around about the perfect length of time, but that tends to make people feel more stressed than anything – and the most counterproductive thing you can do while aiming to get to sleep is to be anxious.”
If you’re going to sleep for longer, avoid the 45 to 60 minute range that promotes sleep grogginess, that spaced-out feeling when you wake. “Research would say it is preferable to take a longer nap of 60 to 90 minutes compared to a medium-length nap,” notes the expert. “Forty-five minutes is long enough to send you into slow-wave sleep and it is more probable to feel sluggish upon awakening – while if you extend it a bit longer to an hour or 90 minutes, you’re likely to be on the end a natural sleep cycle and are likely to awaken feeling more alert. Though if you're dozing for an hour and a half, it may impact your sleep in the evening.”
Finding an Ideal Snooze Setting
Regarding exact methodologies, suggestions are diverse. Some experts propose adopting comparable habits you’d use to foster quality nighttime sleep: a quiet room, a cozy bed and maximum darkness as is feasible. Others suggest that one could simply nap on the sofa with ambient lighting is available – to prevent that groggy feeling and to preserve your bedroom as the environment your mind associates with nighttime rest. “Napping is notoriously difficult to force,” notes a sleep coach. “Lacking the urge to sleep, it becomes harder to recline and essentially command yourself to fall asleep. There’s got to be a natural inclination there to bring the sleep on in the first place. Personally, I can often nap in broad daylight and naturally wake up alarm-free, but what helps most folks is to anticipate a moment that they’re naturally slightly tired and calmly relax into it.”
Experimentation is key, and if you have few options – for instance, when aiming to fit in some shut-eye while traveling or at the office – it's acceptable with bringing sleep aids. “In my work with footballers, I recommend that they not rely on sleeping in their bed, because they’re going to have|they will
