Hear plenty of productivity gurus, and it’s easy to convince yourself that napping is a superpower: not just a band-aid following a bad night’s sleep, but a shortcut towards enhanced cognition, improved mood and maybe a faster 5k run time. Premier League footballers are all at it – along with professional piano players, fighters and media moguls. However, if you haven’t got a dedicated nap-room or a career that encourages frequent naps, can there *honestly* sufficient advantages to a burst of shut-eye to justify the hassle? Can you find a surefire technique to get to sleep quickly enough? Furthermore, can you truly ensure you’ll wake up feeling refreshed, instead of groggy?
Understanding Your Nap Motivation
“We can identify three main reasons for daytime sleep for many people,” notes a professor of circadian rhythm specialist. “One is known as recovery napping, essentially what you do after experiencing insufficient sleep the night before. Another is pre-emptive sleep, when you are pre-empting sleep loss in the future, for example if you’re working graveyard shifts. Finally, there's “hedonic napping”, which basically comes down to wanting: there is a chance to sleep in the afternoon, and it feels nice to do it.”
The primary task to do, then, is to think about why you want to nap. “Naps can be truly beneficial when overnight rest is being disrupted because of factors beyond your control – such as, when you are a new parent, or if you are healing from illness or heavy physical exertion,” says a sleep specialist. “Yet when you take a nap as your sleep at night feels fragile or poor, that is frequently a sign your body's sleep pressure is not as strong as required. In those cases, naps can become a contributing factor, not the solution. Employ naps as a short-term solution to address immediate needs – the focus must always be a robust and regular overnight rest.”
The Optimal Nap Length
This means that naps ought not to be sufficiently lengthy to disrupt your sleep at night, and ideally should not occur after about 3pm (based on the time you sleep in the evening). What's a reasonable length? Advice differs. In one of the most referenced research about napping, experts found that astronauts experienced up to a 54% increase in attentiveness and a 34% increase in performance following a nap of 26 minutes (to be precise, this involved a six-minute long falling asleep phase). “My advice is setting a timer for 20-30 minutes – the majority fall asleep quickly,” explains a sleep expert. “There is plenty of recommendations concerning the optimal amount of time, yet that often cause people to feel more anxious than anything else – and the least helpful action you can do while aiming to fall asleep is to stress over it.”
If you’re going to sleep for longer, steer clear of the period between 45 and 60 minutes that induces sleep grogginess, that foggy state upon waking. “Studies would say it is preferable to have a longer nap of 60 to 90 minutes compared to a medium-length nap,” says the expert. “45 minutes is long enough to plunge you into slow-wave sleep making it more likely to feel groggy when you wake up – whereas if you take it a little longer to an hour or 90 minutes, it's likely you'll to be completing a natural sleep cycle and will probably wake up feeling more refreshed. However, if you're dozing for 90 minutes, it will affect the quality of your sleep later that night.”
Establishing the Perfect Nap Environment
When it comes to precise methods, suggestions are diverse. Some experts suggest using similar routines one would use to foster a good night’s sleep: a silent space, a supportive surface and as much darkness as is feasible. Others suggest that it's fine to merely snooze on a couch in whatever light happens to be around – to avoid sleep inertia and to “protect” your sleeping quarters as the environment you associate with *real* sleep. “Sleep is something really tricky to command,” explains an expert. “Without any sleepiness, it becomes harder to recline and basically command yourself to nod off. You need a natural inclination available to initiate sleep initially. I can usually nap in broad daylight and naturally wake up alarm-free, but what helps most folks is to anticipate an instance when they are naturally somewhat sleepy and just gently relax into it.”
Trying different approaches is valuable, and if options are scarce – for example, when aiming to squeeze in 40 winks while traveling or in a soundproof office pod – it's acceptable to employ sleep aids. “In my work with professional sportspeople, I recommend that they don’t get used to napping in bed, because they’re going to have|they will
