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Lucas Porter
Podcast Content
It is fine to have naps, even after getting a solid nights rest, because even a solid nights rest cannot be compared with the calming sensation that napping provides. There are a lot of different reasons for taking a nap, such as being tired, having a small break, feeling refreshed, or just passing time.
Increasingly popular is the idea of caffeine-fueled naps, where you drink a caffeine-laced beverage right before falling asleep to get 20 minutes of sleep. You could either set a timer, or you can go on a coffee nap, in which you consume a cup full of coffee right before closing your eyes. Since caffeine takes around 20 minutes to kick in, the coffee would eliminate the sleep inertia from taking a 20-minute nap or longer.
A 90-minute nap allows for one complete sleep cycle, says Keir. There are various sleep cycles depending on the age bracket, but taking naps may become bad habits that cause you to become sluggish. Sleep happens in cycles, so it is important to pick the nap duration that works for your daily demands.
For night owls, naps that are identical in duration at the same time will have more REM sleep compared with deeper SWS. The key here is avoiding deep SWS entirely, which is easy: You simply need to get shorter, lighter-sleep naps. With early risers, an early afternoon nap longer than 30 minutes, for instance, would be more laden with deep, restorative slow-wave sleep than with REM sleep.
While taking regular 20-minute naps makes you feel a lot fresher for the afternoon, there is no evidence to suggest doing this regularly helps your health over the long haul. Sometimes, you might take your nap at the wrong time, or a little too long, and you might feel much worse than when you first took it. Napping definitely has its benefits for improving health as well as mental and physical tiredness.
Since the afternoon is sandwiched directly in the middle of the hectic day, taking some time off to nap is truly refreshing. Taking naps between hectic schedules makes things run smoothly, not tiring your eyes or your body.
Taking naps is one of the most powerful things we can do to counteract the detrimental effects of cutting back. For more cellular-level, restorative sleep, the Owls should postpone naps until the later part of the day, as much as possible, although make sure you keep an interval of at least six hours between the nap ending and bedtime. The brain needs rest in multiple breaks, which is why we nap, a 10-minute nap has the power to help you pull off a full-nighter to get through all of the work you are piling up. It is difficult to envision a whole team taking an afternoon nap together every day at two, but if one rare employee finishes their day off with a little extra zest thanks to 15 minutes of napping, perhaps we should let them.
Do not cut the naps time too short, either: Make sure that it does not come too late in the day, or is too brief: Either will lead to the loss of good nights sleep. Try to be a productivity sleeper, taking what Simon Waterson calls a athletes nap, a 20-minute doze mid-day. While many people use caffeine to try and power through their day, caffeines benefits are fairly transitory, while a naps benefits may extend over three or four hours. Studies have long suggested that a perfect power nap is around 20 to 30 minutes , and sleeping less than half an hour, provided that you are able to sleep, requires a huge amount of discipline.
For next best, we asked the expert in the field of sleep, Dr. Nerina Ramlakhan, about the best way to successfully power nap, to maximize recovery and re-boot your productivity. In the current study, we investigated if induction of stress using psychosocial stressors was associated with worse napping sleep quality and higher cortisol levels, and whether the effects were time-dependent. Results indicated an influence of psychosocial stressors on nap sleep quality, specifically on latency to sleep onset and on the amount of sleep immediately following sleep onset. In the napping group, psychosocial stress increased sleep onset latency, but had only minor effects on sleep architecture.
We were able to compare effects of stress with those of no stress on sleep. No other effects were significant, other than increased N2 sleep for the wakening group during the final 15-min segment of naps . Those in the constant group were given a chance to sleep at night only, while those in the divided nap group had the chance of sleeping at night and napping for 1.5 hours during the day. Previous studies have also shown associations between sleep stages and driving following sleep and morning naps , whereas no associations were found with driving following an afternoon nap.
Although the architecture of sleep in the nap usually follows the same patterns as that of the evening sleep , the time of day can also affect the architecture of sleep . Sleep architecture, time of day, as well as duration of the nap can all have specific effects on cortisol levels, particularly on post-wake cortisol levels .
Even if your baby cannot sleep, try to arrange some quiet time during the early afternoon to allow your baby time to rest. The best way to accomplish this is to set up a regular, standardized time in the babys bedroom to take naps, or just have some quiet time or relaxation. This emulates how students are learning on discrete moments in time, as well as accounting for the effects that repeated cycles of napping have on learning.