The Formula to a Flawless Nap: When, Location and Duration?
Tune into a few productivity gurus, and it’s tempting to believe that a nap is a superpower: not just a quick fix after a bad night’s sleep, but a route towards a better memory, better spirits and possibly improved athletic performance. Professional soccer players do it regularly – along with musicians, mixed martial artists and high-profile executives. Yet, when you haven’t got a room for napping or a career that encourages regular snoozing, are there *really* enough benefits to a short sleep to merit the kerfuffle? Can you find a dependable method to get to sleep quickly enough? And can you truly ensure you will arise feeling improved, rather than worse?
Identifying Your Drive to Snooze
“There are three main reasons for taking a nap for many people,” explains an expert sleep science researcher. “Firstly, there's termed make-up sleep, essentially what you do following poor sleep the previous night. Secondly, there's prophylactic napping, which involves anticipating a sleep deficit coming up, for instance when working on night shifts. Finally, there's “pleasure-based sleep”, which simply comes down to desire: there is a chance to nap in the afternoon, and it's enjoyable to do it.”
The first thing to consider, then, is consider your reason for napping. “Naps can be genuinely useful when nighttime sleep is disturbed due to causes you cannot change – for instance, when you are a parent of a newborn, or if you are healing from illness or heavy physical exertion,” says a sleep specialist. “Yet when you nap because your nighttime sleep seems unreliable or poor, that is frequently a sign your sleep drive is not where it should be. Under those circumstances, daytime sleep can turn into part of the issue, rather than the answer. Utilize daytime sleep as a short-term solution for temporary issues – the main goal should still be a solid and consistent sleep at night.”
The Perfect Nap Duration
This implies that napping ought not to be long enough to affect your sleep at night, and preferably should not occur in the late afternoon (depending on the time you sleep at night). What duration is wise? Guidelines are mixed. In one of a prominent study about napping, space agency scientists found that crew members experienced up to a 54% increase in attentiveness plus a 34% rise in performance post a 26-minute snooze (in detail, this counted a six-minute long nodding-off period). “I recommend using an alarm for half an hour or less – the majority fall asleep within 10 minutes,” says a specialist. “You'll find much guidance out there concerning the ideal number of minutes, yet that often make people feel more stressed above all – and the least helpful action you can do when attempting to get to sleep is to stress over it.”
Should you decide to take an extended nap, steer clear of the period between 45 and 60 minutes that induces sleep inertia, that foggy state when you awaken. “Research suggests it's more effective to opt for an extended nap of 60 to 90 minutes compared to a medium-length nap,” says the sleep scientist. “45 minutes is enough time to send you into deep sleep and you’re more likely to feel groggy upon awakening – however, if you nap for a little longer to an hour or 90 minutes, it's likely you'll to finish a natural sleep cycle and will probably wake up feeling more alert. However, if you're dozing for 90 minutes, it will affect how you sleep in the evening.”
Creating an Ideal Snooze Setting
As for precise methods, advice differs. Certain specialists recommend using comparable habits one would use to foster quality nighttime sleep: a quiet room, a comfortable bed and minimal light as you can manage. Some advise that one could merely snooze in a chair in the existing light is available – both to discourage that groggy feeling and to “protect” your bed as the place your mind associates with *real* sleep. “Napping is something really tricky to force,” notes a specialist. “Without any drowsiness, it becomes harder to get comfortable and basically command yourself to fall asleep. There must be some sleep pressure present to initiate sleep in the first place. I can usually take a nap during the day and awaken on my own without an alarm, but what helps a lot of people is to wait for an instance where they feel naturally slightly tired and calmly relax into it.”
Trying different approaches is valuable, and should options are scarce – for example, when aiming to fit in 40 winks on a train or in a work pod – it is perfectly fine to use sleep aids. “In my work with footballers, I suggest that they don’t get used to their own bed for naps, because they’re going to have|they will
