A good midday snooze session can increase alertness, reduce stress, sharpen cognitive skills, improve your mood and help you figure out how to stop being a night owl. In addition to getting some downtime away from the hustle and bustle of your everyday life, napping allows you to reap a myriad of benefits in 90 minutes or less.
However, unlike energy derived from caffeine, the rejuvenating power of a nap benefits your whole body, increasing your learning capacity, overall sleep and memory recall. Lack of sleep is a prevalent problem that can have a number of negative short-term and long-term effects.
And according to the U. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , 1 in 3 American adults are not getting enough regular sleep. One of the most dominant downsides of lack of sleep is stress. Even though the human body is hard-wired to handle stress, constant worry and tension can put you at risk of countless health problems, including anxiety, depression, heart disease, and memory impairment.
By making an effort to squeeze nap time into your busy schedule, you may effectively reduce your stress levels and begin to balance out your sleep troubles. Getting quality sleep can help regulate and reduce the production of cortisol the stress hormone and promote faster immune system recovery—leaving you feeling more emotionally stable and ready to tackle the rest of your day.
In fact, a study conducted at NASA surveyed the cognitive effect of napping on military pilots and astronauts. Longer naps in the morning yield more REM sleep, while those in the afternoon offer more slow-wave sleep. A nap that is long enough to include a full sleep cycle, at least 90 minutes, will limit sleep inertia by allowing you to wake from REM sleep. Most mammals sleep for short periods throughout the day. Humans have consolidated sleep into one long period, but our bodies are programmed for two periods of intense sleepiness: in the early morning, from about 2am to 4am, and in the afternoon, between 1pm and 3pm.
This midday wave of drowsiness is not due to heat or a heavy lunch it occurs even if we skip eating but from an afternoon quiescent phase in our physiology, which diminishes our reaction time, memory, coordination, mood, and alertness.
To determine the best time to nap, it helps to know your "chronotype". What time would you get up and go to sleep if you were entirely free to plan your day? If you're a lark, apt to wake as early as 6am and go to sleep around 9pm or 10pm, you're going to feel your nap need around 1pm or 1.
If you're an owl, preferring to go to bed after midnight or 1am, and to wake around 8am or 9am, your afternoon "sleep gate" will open later, closer to 2. As a result, napping can help with: Reducing sleepiness Improving learning Aiding memory formation Regulating emotions Naps also play a special role for drivers. Harms of Napping Related Reading. Sign up below for your free gift. Your privacy is important to us. Was this article helpful?
Yes No. Taylor, P. Nap Time. Mantua, J. Exploring the nap paradox: are mid-day sleep bouts a friend or foe?. Sleep medicine, 37, 88— Brooks, A. A brief afternoon nap following nocturnal sleep restriction: which nap duration is most recuperative?. Sleep, 29 6 , — Hilditch, C. Sleep, 39 3 , — Gillberg, M. The effects of a short daytime nap after restricted night sleep. Sleep, 19 7 , — Mander, B. Wake deterioration and sleep restoration of human learning.
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Bedtime Habits for Infants and Children. Seehagen, S. Timely sleep facilitates declarative memory consolidation in infants. Miller, A. Toddler's self-regulation strategies in a challenge context are nap-dependent.
Journal of sleep research, 24 3 , — Hupbach, A. Nap-dependent learning in infants. Sleep structure has now matured and your baby is in a deep period of learning HOW to fall and stay asleep.
The biggest change here is that the part of the sleep cycle known as NREM sleep has differentiated from being one stage to four stages. First, your baby may have difficulty falling asleep particularly independently because she must drift off through these light, unfamiliar stages of sleep. You may be able to get her to a nice drowsy state, and lay her down softly on her sleep surface, only for a slight startle to jolt her back awake fully.
This struggle in falling asleep initially may cause her to miss her optimal sleep opportunity — i. Second, your baby experiences micro-awakenings following each sleep cycle of 30 to 45 mins as part of a normal sleep architecture.
Because your baby is still learning how it feels to arouse and be in the light stages of sleep, she may struggle to drift back into the deeper, more restorative stages of sleep. And, feeling that some of that sleep quota has been filled, instead of going back to sleep, she just wakes up instead. This is going to be particularly true if there has been a major shift in her environment since she first fell asleep — like waking up alone instead of in your arms. First, if crap naps have been a pattern, you will likely be able to anticipate the waking down to the minute.
An, often successful, technique called anticipated waking may be sufficient to get your baby through this arousal. In this strategy, you sneak into the room just prior to the regular wake interval e.
Second, you can wait until he wakes, give him 5 mins or so to try to go back to sleep, and then go into the room and help him. I recommend first keeping him on his sleep surface and try to help him fall back asleep by embracing him in the crib or bringing your cheek next to his.
This prevents the extra arousal caused by the transfer out of the crib. I have countless memories of sitting in the dark nap room with my baby in my arms for an hour or more TIP: bring your phone and headphones and get your Netflix fix in!
Finally, if the nap is truly done, get baby up, start your next wake window, and try again at the next nap. That said, associations that were established during the previous stage are likely to contribute significantly to how your baby falls and stays asleep.
As above, short naps may result from overtiredness i. You may not have a set nap schedule yet as far as the clock goes , but keeping consistent wake windows now 2 to 2. This is generally also the period of the 3 to 2 nap transition , which can make it difficult for your baby to get enough daytime sleep if naps are crappy.
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