Tune into enough performance podcasters, making it tempting to believe that napping is a superpower: more than a quick fix following restless night, but a shortcut towards a better memory, better spirits and perhaps quicker running times. Professional soccer players do it regularly – as do professional piano players, mixed martial artists & media moguls. However, if you don't have a dedicated nap-room or a career that permits regular snoozing, can there *honestly* worthwhile perks to a burst of shut-eye to merit the hassle? Does there exist a surefire technique to get to sleep quickly enough? Plus, is it possible to really guarantee you will get up feeling better, instead of groggy?
Identifying Your Drive to Snooze
“Experts note three key drivers for daytime sleep in the adult population,” explains a professor of sleep science specialist. “Firstly, there's what we call compensatory napping, which is the action you take when you’ve had poor sleep overnight. The second is pre-emptive sleep, where you are preparing for sleep loss ahead, for example during graveyard shifts. The third reason is “pleasure-based sleep”, which simply comes down to the wish: you have a chance to nap during the day, and it's pleasant to nap.”
The primary task to consider, so, is consider your reason for napping. “Daytime sleep can be truly beneficial when night sleeping is disturbed because of factors outside your control – for instance, when you are a new parent, or if you are healing from sickness or heavy physical exertion,” explains a sleep physiologist. “Yet when you take a nap because your nighttime sleep feels fragile or broken, that’s often a signal your sleep drive is not at the level required. Under those circumstances, naps can become part of the issue, instead of the fix. Employ naps for brief periods to address immediate needs – the main goal must always be a solid and consistent night’s sleep.”
The Ideal Snooze Time
This implies that naps shouldn’t be sufficiently lengthy to disrupt your nighttime sleep, and ideally shouldn’t take place after about 3pm (based on what time you sleep at night). What duration is wise? Guidelines are mixed. Among the most-cited studies regarding daytime sleep, experts noted that crew members experienced up to a 54% increase in attentiveness and a 34% boost in performance after a 26-minute nap (in detail, this involved a six-minute long nodding-off period). “I recommend setting an alarm for half an hour or less – the majority fall asleep within 10 minutes,” notes a specialist. “There’s a lot of advice around about the perfect length of time, however, that can make people feel more stressed than anything else – and the worst thing one can do while aiming to fall asleep is to be anxious.”
Should you decide to take an extended nap, avoid the 45-60 minute window that promotes that sluggish feeling, that disoriented sensation when you awaken. “Research would say it’s better to take a lengthier snooze of one to one and a half hours than a medium-length one,” notes the sleep scientist. “45 minutes is sufficient to send you into slow-wave sleep making it more likely to feel sluggish upon awakening – while if you nap for a little longer to an hour or 90 minutes, you’re likely to be completing a full cycle and will probably wake up feeling more refreshed. However, if you’re sleeping for 90 minutes, it may impact how you sleep later that night.”
Establishing the Perfect Sleep Space
Regarding precise methods, advice differs. Some experts recommend adopting comparable habits you’d use to foster a good night’s sleep: a silent space, a supportive surface and maximum darkness as possible. Alternatively, experts propose that it's fine to simply nap on a couch with ambient lighting is present – both to discourage sleep inertia and to “protect” your bed as the space you associate with *real* sleep. “Sleep is something really tricky to will,” says an expert. “If you don’t have any sleepiness, it is more challenging to get comfortable and essentially tell yourself to nod off. You need some drive there to start the process in the first place. Personally, I can often nap during the day and awaken on my own without an alarm, however, what assists a lot of people is to look for an instance that they’re naturally slightly tired and calmly allow sleep to come.”
It’s worth experimenting, and if you have few options – such as, if you’re trying to grab some shut-eye while traveling or at the office – it's acceptable to employ a few tools. “Coaching elite athletes, I recommend that they avoid becoming accustomed to their own bed for naps, because they’re going to have|they will
