Take a nap

THE PRINCIPLE

Short naps leave you refreshed and more creative

The Spanish, Greeks and Italians have known it for a long time: a nap in the afternoon is a good thing.

The North American Space Agency confirmed it with a study that showed a 34 per cent increase in performance following a 26-minute nap. (Do you notice that statistics never seem to come in odd numbers?)

Nap expert Dr Sara C. Mednick (author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life – and no, I’m not making that up) says that different lengths of nap have different benefits. To increase alertness, try 20 minutes, for better memory try 40, and for increased creativity, it’s 90 minutes.

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Some businesses have even installed ‘energy pods’ in which their employees can catch ‘forty winks’. Cisco is one of them, and Vinayak Sudame, an engineer there, told the New York Times that taking a 10- to 15-minute nap helps him return to work with a ‘reorganised perspective’.

The good news is that you already have an energy pod in your home. It’s called a bed.

Do your own experiments with different lengths of nap to see what effect they have for you. I find that after a nap of 20–30 minutes, I’m ready to return to my work refreshed and with a clear head; but if I sleep for 30–45 minutes, I tend to wake up groggy. The next comfortable exit point is 90 minutes but for most of us carving an extra 90 minutes out of our day for sleeping is not practical.

Naps should be in addition to, not a substitute for, getting enough sleep at night (meaning 7–8 hours in most cases). But when you find your brainpower flagging, rather than struggling through 20 unproductive minutes, taking a short power nap may well be the answer.

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