Hear enough performance experts, making it easy to convince yourself that napping is a superpower: more than a quick fix after restless night, but a route to a better memory, a brighter outlook and perhaps improved athletic performance. Premier League footballers swear by it – along with concert pianists, mixed martial artists & business leaders. However, if you lack a dedicated nap-room or a job that encourages frequent naps, can there *honestly* enough benefits to a short sleep to merit the kerfuffle? Can you find a surefire technique to fall asleep fast? Furthermore, can you really guarantee you will get up feeling refreshed, not worse?
Identifying The Nap Motivation
“There are three primary motivations for napping among most adults,” explains an expert sleep and circadian science specialist. “One is known as recovery napping, essentially what you do when you’ve had a lack of sleep the previous night. Another is prophylactic napping, where you are pre-empting insufficient sleep ahead, for example during graveyard shifts. The third reason is “pleasure-based sleep”, which simply boils down to desire: you get a chance to sleep during the day, and it's pleasant to do it.”
The primary task to undertake, then, is to think about why you want to nap. “Naps can be genuinely useful when nighttime sleep gets interrupted for reasons you cannot change – for instance, for caring for an infant, or if you are healing from sickness or intense exercise,” says a sleep physiologist. “However, if you take a nap since your sleep at night feels fragile or unreliable, that’s often an indicator your sleep drive is not at the level it should be. In those cases, napping can become part of the issue, not the solution. Use napping for brief periods for short-term problems – the priority should still be a robust and regular overnight rest.”
The Ideal Nap Length
This means that daytime sleep ought not to be too extended to interfere with your overnight rest, and ideally shouldn’t take place post-3 p.m. (contingent on what time you go to bed at night). What duration is wise? Guidelines are mixed. In one of the most-cited studies on the subject, researchers at Nasa found that crew members had improvements of over 50% in alertness and a 34% boost in cognitive performance following a nap of 26 minutes (in detail, this involved a six-minute falling asleep phase). “I recommend using an alarm for half an hour or less – the majority fall asleep within 10 minutes,” says a sleep coach. “There is plenty of advice around concerning the optimal amount for sleeping, yet that often lead individuals to become more stressed than anything else – and the least helpful action one can do when attempting to fall asleep is to be anxious.”
Should you decide to sleep for longer, avoid the period between 45 and 60 minutes that promotes sleep grogginess, that spaced-out feeling when you wake. “The science would say it’s better to opt for an extended nap of 60 to 90 minutes than a medium-length one,” says the sleep scientist. “Three-quarters of an hour is long enough to send you into slow-wave sleep making it more likely to feel sluggish when you get up – while if you take it slightly longer to an hour or 90 minutes, you’re likely to be completing a full cycle and are likely to awaken feeling more refreshed. But if you're dozing for a long period, it will affect your sleep that night.”
Creating the Right Sleep Space
As for precise methods, recommendations vary. Certain specialists suggest adopting similar routines you use to encourage restful sleep: a silent space, a supportive surface and minimal light as is feasible. Some advise that you should simply nap on a couch in the existing light is available – to avoid that groggy feeling and to maintain your sleeping quarters as the environment your mind associates with nighttime rest. “Falling asleep is quite challenging to will,” says a specialist. “Without any drowsiness, it is tougher to get comfortable and basically tell yourself to fall asleep. There’s got to be some sleep pressure available to start the process to begin with. Personally, I can often take a nap in broad daylight and wake up naturally without an alarm, though, what aids a lot of people is to look for a moment that they’re naturally feeling a bit drowsy and just gently relax into it.”
It’s worth experimenting, and if your choices are limited – such as, if attempting to grab 40 winks during a commute or at the office – it is perfectly fine to employ sleep aids. “In my work with footballers, I suggest that they not rely on their own bed for naps, since they’re going to have|they will
