You feel great after a poor night's sleep right? You definitely couldn’t go for a nap around late afternoon.. BUT if you could go for a nap, here’s how you can reason with your family and friends regarding the usefulness of a midday snooze!
Contrary to popular belief, a nap CAN makeup for most of a poor night's sleep. In fact, anytime someone calls you lazy for taking a nap, ask them if they think that focus, memory retention, mood, and alertness are lazy traits. They aren’t, but they are traits that can be improved with a nap! We have touched before on our blog on the importance of sleep in terms of what you have to lose from not sleeping enough, but naps can counteract a lot of that.
If you are a college kid who stays up late to “get an assignment done” (party), if you are getting older and are struggling to sleep well anymore (you release less melatonin as you get older), or if you wake up early to an arch nemesis bluebird cawing outside your window that you have names apnea for a reason... a nap could be for you!
Sleep improves all sorts of cognitive and physical performance metrics. It is easy to forget things as it is and a lot of us have to study or retain information of some sort to perform at work or in school! Coincidentally, sleep is when your brain organizes and moves your daily experiences into long term memory. Specifically, this occurs during slow brain wave activity. So if you ever need to study for something, feel free to take a 20-30 minute power nap right after your 1-1.5 hour study block to slow your brain waves and increase your information retention! This can even be in addition to a good night's sleep as an extra performance hack.
Right now you’re saying “look you wonderful humans, this seems too good to be true”. Well rest assured, CCHS always pulls information from research and just presents it in a super practical way! For example, this improved memory retention and increased hippocampal activity after naps was shown to be the case in Ong et al. which is listed below! Other sources for your leisurely reading are listed below if you really want to impress your friends!
Help us out by telling your weary and tired friends to take a nap. If they fight it, show them this. If they still disagree, tell them to text us at 607-444-2395 and we can hook them up with some free weight loss and health coaching! Per usual, thank you for reading you wonderful humans!