Do you know that sleeping in the day time for few minutes can do much more than just boosting your energy up? So, what is the science behind power naps and why is it damn good for you?
Humans sleep once a day while all the remaining 85% mammalians sleep many times a day. Scientists aren’t sure humans are naturally monophasic or the modern life style made us so. Whatever it is but it is sure that we are lacking enough sleep.
Power naps can alleviate these sleep deficits. In fact, they can also boost our brains and improves creative problem solving, verbal memory, perpetual, object and statistical learning. It helps in improving our math, logical reasoning, reaction times and symbol recognition. These short power naps improve mood, feelings of fatigue and sleepiness. It’s also good for our heart, stress levels, blood pressure and even weight management to our surprise.
So, what is a power nap and how to do it the right way?
Various Types of Naps:
A power nap is a session during the day time ideally between 1pm to 4pm where we sleep from 10 to 30 minutes. If you sleep longer, this may risk of developing sleep inertia. Similarly if you sleep after 4pm, it can disrupt your regular night sleep.
Naps at different time durations have different benefits. A 10-20 minute nap quickly boosts alertness. An interesting point to be noted is a six minute nap, which is an ultra short nap improves declarative memory which means long term memory that has the ability to recall facts and knowledge. 60 minutes nap is good for cognitive memory processing while 90 minutes nap improves creativity, emotional and procedural memory.
So, there are four types of naps.
Planned Naps:
Planned nap is also known as preemptive nap where you sleep even before you feel sleepy. Prefer this if you are planning to sleep at night.
Emergency Naps:
Taking a nap when you are so sleepy that you can’t concentrate on your current activity is called emergency nap. It’s advisable to do when you need to put your whole concentration on work. Take this nap, wake up more energetic, fresh and get back to work with full concentration.
Habitual Naps:
You have a particular time to sleep regularly. This kind of nap is said to be habitual nap. Most of the people during the afternoons take this kind of naps.
Appetitive Naps:
Appetitive nap is an act of sleeping for enjoyment.
Benefits:
We know by now that napping is good for alertness, memory, performance, and learning.
It restores attention, improves our work quality and reduces the mistakes. Thankfully, these days companies and firms are creating space for sleeping providing encouragement and supportive environment.
Grabbing a cup of coffee will also increase alertness but you should think again since naps are better than caffeine.
Nap also reduces our stress levels which is essential for our health.
It also manages blood pressure. It provides heart related benefits by accelerating cardiovascular recovery after stress. 45 minute nap can lower blood pressure. Minimum 30 minutes nap thrice a week can prevent heart related diseases.
Napping is good and essential for all age groups but unfortunately these days, children are sleeping very less.
But there’s another study which says day time sleeping is not good for effective learning in children. So, distributed naps are critical in children. It’s critical in early learning students.
Similarly naps help infants to stay active, and learn languages easily. Children between 2 and 3 years of age who don’t take naps show anxiety, less activeness, and poor understanding power.
Thankfully, napping frequency is slowly increasing day by day.