The Key to a Flawless Snooze: Timing, Where and for How Long?
Tune into enough self-improvement gurus, and you'll be simple to believe that a nap is a powerful tool: more than a quick fix after poor sleep, but a path to enhanced cognition, better spirits and possibly quicker running times. Professional footballers are all at it – and so are concert pianists, mixed martial artists and media moguls. Yet, when you haven’t got a room for napping or a career that permits frequent naps, can there *honestly* enough benefits to a short sleep to merit the kerfuffle? Does there exist a surefire technique to get to sleep quickly enough? Plus, is it possible to truly ensure you’ll wake up feeling better, rather than worse?
Understanding Your Drive to Snooze
“Experts note three primary motivations for taking a nap in the adult population,” notes a leading sleep and circadian science specialist. “Firstly, there's known as make-up sleep, which is what you do after experiencing a lack of sleep the previous night. The second is pre-emptive sleep, which involves preparing for insufficient sleep in the future, for example during overnight shifts. The third reason is “pleasure-based sleep”, which essentially is about wanting: you have an opportunity to doze during the day, and it's pleasant to nap.”
The initial step to do, therefore, is consider why you want to nap. “Daytime sleep can be genuinely useful when nighttime sleep is being disrupted because of factors beyond your control – such as, when you are a new parent, or if you are healing from sickness or intense exercise,” explains a sleep expert. “Yet when you nap as your night sleep feels fragile or unreliable, that is frequently an indicator your body's sleep pressure is not as strong as it needs to be. In such situations, naps can become part of the issue, not the solution. Use napping as a short-term solution for temporary issues – the main goal must always be a strong and predictable overnight rest.”
The Perfect Snooze Time
This implies that daytime sleep shouldn’t be long enough to interfere with your overnight rest, and best are not recommended in the late afternoon (depending on the time you sleep in the evening). How long is sensible? Guidelines are mixed. From a prominent study on the subject, researchers at Nasa noted that crew members showed a boost of up to 54% in attentiveness and a 34% boost in cognitive performance after a 26-minute nap (technically, this involved an initial six-minute nodding-off period). “I’d suggest using an alarm for 20 to 30 minutes – the majority doze off within 10 minutes,” notes a sleep coach. “You'll find much advice around about the ideal number for sleeping, yet that often make people feel more anxious than anything – and the most counterproductive thing you can do when trying to get to sleep is to be anxious.”
If you plan to nap for a longer period, avoid the 45 to 60 minute range that promotes sleep grogginess, that foggy state when you wake. “Studies would say it is preferable to take a lengthier snooze of 60 to 90 minutes than a medium-length one,” notes the professor. “45 minutes is sufficient to send you into deep sleep making it more likely to feel disoriented upon awakening – while if you extend it a bit longer to 60 or 90 minutes, it's likely you'll to be completing of a sleep cycle and are likely to get up feeling more rejuvenated. Though if you're dozing for an hour and a half, it can influence how you sleep that night.”
Creating the Right Nap Environment
As for exact methodologies, suggestions are diverse. A few professionals recommend using comparable habits you’d use to encourage restful sleep: a peaceful area, a supportive surface and minimal light as you can manage. Alternatively, experts propose that one could merely snooze on the sofa in the existing light is present – to avoid post-nap grogginess and to maintain your bedroom as the space your mind associates with *real* sleep. “Sleep is quite challenging to command,” explains a sleep coach. “If you don’t have any drowsiness, it is more challenging to lie down and essentially command yourself to fall asleep. There’s got to be some drive present to initiate sleep to begin with. I can usually snooze in broad daylight and wake up naturally without a timer, though, what aids a lot of people is to wait for an instance that they’re naturally somewhat sleepy and then simply ease into sleep.”
Experimentation is key, and if your choices are limited – for example, if you’re trying to fit in a quick nap while traveling or in a work pod – it is perfectly fine with bringing some accessories. “Coaching professional sportspeople, I advise that they avoid becoming accustomed to napping in bed, since they’re going to have|they will
