Both a short five-minute nap and a full night’s sleep to get rid of fatigue and also recharge with energy for at least 2–3 hours.
Moreover, by resting during the day, you can improve your mental performance in several directions at once:
- Increase your attention span. 11 studies found that naps can help you stay focused and alert for hours after waking up.
- Improve memorization of verbal information. In one , students who took a nap during the day after studying remembered the information much better than those who crammed or simply rested during this time. Moreover, the knowledge was retained a week after the experiment.
- Speed up motor skill learning. Scientists that after an hour of napping, people are much better at learning new motor tasks, such as pressing buttons in a certain order.
- Improve logical thinking. Just 15 minutes of daytime rest not only get rid of drowsiness, but also increases the accuracy of logical reasoning.
- Speed up your reaction. After a nap, people faster to visual stimuli. This may be why a 15-minute nap combined with caffeine the risk of road accidents by three times.
In addition, daytime sleep to “reboot” emotionally and reduce psychological stress. After waking up, a person is usually less prone to impulsive behavior and copes better with frustration.
Moreover, daytime sleep is equally for people of all ages, regardless of whether they are used to napping after lunch or do not usually do so.
The benefits are enjoyed by both those who have had a good night’s rest and those who have not had any sleep at all: people with regular schedules, night workers and drivers on long trips.
However, if you don’t calculate the timing correctly, you can get the opposite effect.
How much sleep do you need to feel good?
Most scientific studies agree that it is better not to doze for longer than half an hour; ideally, rest should last 15–20 minutes.
There are two main reasons not to prolong your afternoon nap.
1. Sleep inertia. This is disorientation, lethargy , and confusion that persists for some time after waking up.
The longer you sleep during the day, the longer the inertia will last. For example, after a 10-minute nap, you will alert and energetic almost immediately. A 20-30-minute nap will require about half an hour to fully wake up.
But if you lie down for 1–2 hours, the first time after waking up you risk getting lost in space and time.
The thing is that about 40 minutes after falling asleep, the body into deep sleep mode. In this state, the brain slow delta waves, the eyes do not move under the eyelids, the muscles relax.
The more time you spend in this phase, the the inertia will be and the more difficult it will be to awaken.
2. Disruption of nighttime sleep. Long daytime rest can affect the quality of nighttime sleep: reduce the recovery periods of slow delta sleep and worsen its quality in general.
But 15-20 minute naps during the day will certainly your circadian rhythms and will not prevent you from getting a good night’s rest.
What time is best to sleep during the day
Despite individual differences, most people have biological clocks that are aligned.
The greatest sleepiness from 1 to 4 am, the peak of energy occurs from 10 am to 1 pm, and after lunch – somewhere from 1 to 4 pm – many people feel sleepy again.
The last interval is ideal for a daytime nap.
One experiment that if you lie down for 20 minutes at 2 p.m., your mood , well-being, and mental performance will be much better than if you do the same thing at noon.
As for later breaks, they will also provide alertness, but may negatively affect falling asleep at night.
Can daytime sleep be harmful?
There is some evidence that long naps are not particularly beneficial. A meta-analysis of seven studies with data from 98,000 people that people who regularly napped for more than 60 minutes during the day had an increased risk of overall mortality compared to those who napped for shorter periods.
Another study that daytime sleep lasting more than an hour increases the risk of type 2 diabetes by 31%.
Most likely, the habit of taking a nap after lunch is not harmful in itself, but only indicates that something is wrong in the body. So if you cannot do without 1-2 hours of daytime sleep, then it is probably worth consulting a therapist to rule out possible diseases.
