What Napping Does to Your Health
You know that having a good night sleep is good for your health. How about a short nap during the day? A large body of scientific research suggests that taking naps everyday benefit a person in many ways. Sadly, napping is often frowned upon in our workaholic society. Many people think that naps are just for the lazy and unambitious, or for the retirees who have plenty of time on their hands. Many times, when we doze off, we feel guilty.
Humans are among the few animals that take sleep for granted. Many people would not even sleep if they could, just to keep pace with their hectic schedule. The rest of the animal kingdom consists of polyphasic sleepers – they alternate sleep and wake cycles throughout a 24 hour period. Even our ancestors slept in multiple phases too, as someone has to keep an eye out for deadly beasts. But while the pace of modern life may keep us from being the biphasic sleepers we were meant to be, napping remains to be hardwired in our biology.
And science wise, napping can be a powerful tool towards maintaining a healthy body and a sharp mind. Few people realise that a brief slumber during the day can actually increase their productivity and performance at work.
While a good night’s sleep is essential, a daily nap can help sustain our energy even if we had very little sleep the other night. And for those who already sleep well at night, a nap can take the performance of your body and mind to the next level.
So in what specific ways does taking power naps boost our health?
It improves learning and working memory.
Taking naps help improve our working memory. This type of memory is involved in working on complex tasks where you have to pay attention to one thing while holding a bunch of other things in your memory. If you’re preparing for an exam, it’s good to power nap too. Napping improves memory retention. During sleep, recent memories are transferred to the neocortex, where long-term memories are solidified and stored.
It sparks creativity.
According to nap expert Sara Mednick, napping can improve your sensory perception as effectively as a night of sleep. Napping promotes creativity by both loosening up the web of ideas in your head and fusing disparate insights together.
It boosts overall health.
Sleep deprivation leads to an excess of the hormone cortisol in the body. Cortisol, known as the stress hormone, helps us deal with fight or flight responses. But excess cortisol has ill effects to human body. It causes glucose intolerance and abdominal fat, weakens the muscular and immune systems, impairs memory and learning, and decreases levels of growth hormone and testosterone in our bodies. All these can lead to diabetes and heart disease. In one study, those that took a 30 minute nap at least three times a week had 37% less risk of dying from a heart-related condition. Among working men their risk of death was reduced 64%! So not only should you dance like Zorba the Greek, you should nap like him, too.
It lifts up your mood.
Feeling upset, anxious or irritable? Take some nap. According to Mednick, napping replenishes the serotonin levels in the brain, reversing those effects and creating a more positive outlook. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that regulates our mood, sleep, and appetite. Higher levels of serotonin are linked to lower stress levels, better mood, and feelings of contentment and well-being, while lower levels are linked to anxiety, depression and other negative emotions.
Tailoring Your Nap to Your Needs
The perfect nap for everyone is 90 minutes long and taken between 1 and 3 in the afternoon. At this time, and at this length, your nap will consist of the optimal balance of all the different sleep stages. The ratio of the sleep stages in this nap exactly mirrors that of nocturnal sleep. But of course, not everyone has an hour and a half to saw off during the day. And sometimes you want to tailor your nap to your particular needs on a particular day. So what do you do?
If you’re looking to boost your creativity, consider getting a 90 minute nap before 2 pm. To power your creative mind, you need a dose of REM sleep. You’ll need a longer nap to get to the REM stage and since potential REM peaks early in the day and declines from there. If you want to increase your stamina (say, you are about to compete in a marathon), you need Stage 2 sleep which you can get in a 20 minute power nap. Just make sure you don’t go overboard because instead of feeling energetic, you are likely to feel groggy if you oversleep.
To relax during a stressful day, aim for longer nap after 2 pm and ideally in the early evening, so your body can get a cortisol break and repair itself. Naps will not affect your night-time sleep as long as you wake from your nap three hours before bedtime.
If you’re preparing for an exam, shoot for a 90-minute nap. Stage 2 boosts alertness, whilst stages 3 and 4 will clear your mind of unnecessary clutter, solidify the things you just studied, and lower your stress, and REM sleep will move the information into permanent storage and sort through the complex information you just learned.
Power napping is essential to your health and well-being. You just have to spare at least 20 minutes a day to take a power nap and significantly improve your health. So don’t feel guilty about it because you actually deserve it.
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