CathNews New Zealand

The stigma against napping is finally starting to wane — and for good reason.

Taking a timeout to sleep during the day does much more than just give us a quick energy boost. It also confers some serious cognitive and health advantages as well.

Here’s what the latest science tells us.

Unlike 85% of all mammalian species, humans sleep just once a day.

Scientists aren’t sure if we’re naturally monophasic (as opposed to polyphasic) or if it’s modern society that has made us so.

Regardless, it’s clear that we’re not getting enough sleep. Nearly a third of us say we’re simply not getting enough of it.

Power naps can

• alleviate our so-called sleep deficits,
• boost our brains, including improvements to creative problem solving, verbal memory, perceptual learning, object learning, and statistical learning
• help us with math, logical reasoning, our reaction times, and symbol recognition
• improve our mood and feelings of sleepiness and fatigue

Power naps are also good for our heart, blood pressure, stress levels, and surprisingly, even weight management.

Now, before we get into the science behind many of these benefits, it’s important to define what we mean by a power nap — and how to do it right.

Different types of naps

A power nap is a sleep session that happens during the day (ideally between 1:00 to 4:00 PM) lasting between 10 and 30 minutes.

Any longer and you run the risk of developing “sleep inertia” — that unpleasant groggy feeling that takes a considerable amount of time to shake off.

And naps later than 4:00 PM can disrupt your regular nighttime sleep.

But these aren’t hard-and-fast rules. Some sleep scientists, like the University of California, Riverside’s Sara Mednick — author of Take a Nap! Change your Life — says that naps at different durations result in different benefits. For example, a 10 to 20 minute nap will provide a quick boost of alertness while mitigating the onset of sleep inertia.

At the same time, she’s not a huge fan of the 30 minute nap, saying that recovery often takes too long.

Interestingly, research has shown that six-minute naps, known as ultra-short sleep episodes, can improve declarative memory (i.e. a type of long-term memory that pertains to our ability to recall facts and knowledge).

Mednick also makes the case for 60 minute naps, which are also good for cognitive memory processing. But to understand why this is the case, we need to look at how sleep cycles work.

While we’re asleep, the brain cycles through a pattern lasting about 90 to 120 minutes. These stages include non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) (which is associated with dreaming).

During NREM sleep we enter into slow-wave sleep, which is the deepest kind. Slow-wave sleep helps us remember facts, places, and faces, which is why the 60 minute nap helps us in this regard. Continue reading

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