Hear plenty of performance gurus, making it easy to convince yourself that a nap is a secret weapon: rather than a quick fix after a bad night’s sleep, but a shortcut to enhanced cognition, better spirits and maybe improved athletic performance. Professional soccer players swear by it – as do professional piano players, mixed martial artists and business leaders. However, if you lack a dedicated nap-room or employment that allows regular snoozing, can there *honestly* worthwhile perks to a short sleep to merit the effort? Does there exist a surefire technique to get to sleep quickly enough? Plus, is it possible to truly ensure you will get up feeling refreshed, instead of groggy?
Exploring The Nap Motivation
“We can identify three main reasons for napping among most adults,” says a leading sleep and circadian science researcher. “The first is known as compensatory napping, that is what happens after experiencing poor sleep the night before. Another is preparatory napping, where you are pre-empting a sleep deficit in the future, for instance when working graveyard shifts. The third is called “pleasure-based sleep”, which basically is about the wish: you get an opportunity to nap in the daytime, and it's pleasant to do it.”
The initial step to do, then, is consider your nap motivation. “Naps can be genuinely useful when overnight rest is being disrupted because of factors you cannot change – such as, when you are caring for an infant, or if you are healing after being ill or intense exercise,” says a sleep specialist. “But if you take a nap as your sleep at night is unstable or unreliable, that’s often an indicator your sleep drive is not at the level it should be. In those cases, napping can become part of the issue, not the solution. Employ naps as a temporary measure for short-term problems – the main goal ought to remain a robust and regular overnight rest.”
The Perfect Nap Duration
This means that daytime sleep shouldn’t be sufficiently lengthy to affect your nighttime sleep, and ideally shouldn’t take place after about 3pm (depending on what time you sleep in the evening). How long is sensible? Guidelines are mixed. From the most referenced research about napping, space agency scientists found that space travelers experienced up to a 54% increase in attentiveness plus a 34% rise in cognitive performance after a 26-minute nap (in detail, this counted a six-minute falling asleep phase). “I’d suggest using an alarm for 20 to 30 minutes – many individuals are asleep in under ten minutes,” says a sleep expert. “There is plenty of guidance out there about the perfect length for sleeping, but that tends to lead individuals to become more anxious than anything – and the worst thing you can do while aiming to get to sleep is worry about it.”
If you plan to take an extended nap, steer clear of the period between 45 and 60 minutes that induces that sluggish feeling, that disoriented sensation when you wake. “Studies suggests it's more effective to opt for a lengthier snooze lasting 60-90 minutes rather than a mid-length nap,” explains the sleep scientist. “Three-quarters of an hour is enough time to plunge you into deep sleep making it more likely to feel sluggish when you wake up – whereas if you nap for slightly longer to an hour or 90 minutes, you’re likely to be completing of a sleep cycle and will probably awaken feeling more alert. But if you’re sleeping for a long period, it will affect how you sleep in the evening.”
Creating the Perfect Nap Environment
When it comes to specific techniques, recommendations vary. A few professionals propose using similar routines one would use to foster quality nighttime sleep: a quiet room, a comfortable bed and as much darkness as you can manage. Alternatively, experts propose that it's fine to merely snooze on the sofa in whatever light happens to be around – to avoid sleep inertia and to maintain your bed as the environment your brain links with proper sleep. “Sleep is something really tricky to command,” says a specialist. “Without the urge to sleep, it is tougher to lie down and practically instruct yourself to nod off. There’s got to be some drive available to bring the sleep on in the first place. Personally, I can often snooze in full light and wake up naturally without an alarm, though, what aids a lot of people is to look for a moment where they feel naturally slightly tired and calmly allow sleep to come.”
Experimentation is key, and if your choices are limited – for instance, when aiming to fit in 40 winks on a train or in a work pod – there’s nothing wrong to use some accessories. “In my work with footballers, I recommend that they not rely on their own bed for naps, since they’re going to have|they will
