Forget what you might have heard in the past about naps. For those who respond well to naps (and who learn the ropes to perfecting this art), naps can provide a wealth of rewards that go beyond just you feel better and able to tackle the rest of your day.

Naps have been shown scientifically to benefit almost every aspect of human wellness from the physical rewards of lowering your risk for heart disease and repairing cells to the more obvious ones of lifting your mood and stamina, knocking down stress, and making you more productive. Because naps can improve heart functioning, support hormonal maintenance, and encourage cell repair, they can help you live longer, stay more active, and look younger.

These benefits, of course, are what nocturnal sleep is for, so the purpose of a nap is to plunge you into and out of rejuvenating sleep as fast as possible. By doing so, you tap into these benefits during the day instead of having to wait until nighttime to recoup them. MRIs of nappers have shown that brain activity stays high throughout the day with a nap; without one, it declines as the day wears on.

The brain is the part of the body most affected by a nap, which is evidenced by greater alertness, improved memory retention, and enhanced ability to think creatively and insightfully. By sharpening your motor skills and neuromuscular coordination, napping can make you better at just about anything you do, from dancing and playing the piano to driving a car, making quick decisions, responding to stimuli or danger, exploring the Internet, and typing frantically on a computer, tablet or a smartphone.

Psychologist Dr. Sara C. Mednick, a scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, has been leading the way in conducting napping research, publishing convincing data with colleagues at Harvard University, among others, on the value and benefits of napping. Collectively, recent findings among the top nap researchers are demonstrating just how naps enhance information to process and learning. In a nutshell, napping has been shown to:

  • Improve a person’s capacity to learn certain tasks, and
  • Reverse information overload by protecting brain circuits overuse until those neurons can consolidate what’s already been learned.

How Long Is The Perfect Nap?

The twenty-minute power nap has been talked about for years, but napping doesn’t have to be so confined. You can gain a lot of benefits from as little as five minutes, and as much as two or more hours (but, please, no more than three). As mentioned earlier, if you can achieve a full cycle of sleep through slow-wave, or deep, sleep, you stand to the most out of a mid-day snoozes.

If you’ve tried to nap in the past and you’ve awakened grog feeling worse off than beforehand, this is most likely because haven’t timed it right and you’ve awakened in the middle of that wave sleep stage. During this stage, your brain’s activity is polar o to how it functions while you’re awake. At this stage, you’ve corn tuned out the external world and your entire brain rhythm synchronizes into a slow, uniform pattern instead of multitasking and operating many frequencies.

If you suddenly come out of slow-wave sleep forces your brain to desynchronize and fire off high-frequency electrical activity. Until your brain catches up to the fact you’re actually you’ll feel slow, sleepy, and probably cranky, too. Your limbs will heavyweights, your eyes won’t focus well, you’ll have a hard time sounding articulate, and your mind will feel left behind. A quick way to slap your brain into wakeful shape is to do something physical, listen to stimulating music, or splash cold water on your face.

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