Do you find yourself falling asleep in your chair after being in class for a couple of hours? Do you drink multiple cups of coffee and Red Bull just to keep your eyes open long enough to study for an exam? Do you have trouble remembering the material that you studied earlier in the day? Set aside a few minutes for a power nap!
Humans are one of the only species of mammals that only sleep once per day. In fact, 85% of mammals sleep for several short periods of time throughout the day, according to The National Sleep Foundation. This makes us ask the question: why don’t humans do this more? Maybe only sleeping at night is not what we are meant to do. Young children (and many elderly people) nap multiple times per day, while college students, for example, might only get 4-5 hours of sleep per night, which is not enough for most people.
A full sleep cycle is roughly 90 minutes, but sleeping for even 10-20 minutes is still beneficial. Sleeping for this short amount of time allows for some rest, but restricts us to the earlier stages of NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep. That way, we still get some rest without falling into too deep of a sleep, making it easy to wake up and continue with your day. Twenty minute naps can result in alertness and performance improvement in almost all aspects of life, improve our mood, and give that extra boost of energy that you need to get through class.
A study was conducted on naps at Saarland University in Germany. Before the study, the subjects were given a list of 90 words and 120 word pairs. One group (treatment group) took a short nap of roughly 45 minutes, while the other group (control group) stayed awake and watched DVDs. The results were that the participants who slept remembered more of the words than those who had watched DVDs. This shows that even a short nap has a positive correlation with learning success.
In conclusion, try incorporating a nap into your daily routine. As college students, we are up late almost every night whether we are studying in the library or hanging out with friends. Even if you are not tired, taking a short nap will give you that extra bit of energy you need to get through the day and will also help your study habits.
If this post interested you or you want to learn more about the importance of naps, check out this TEDx talk by Dr. Sara Mednick from the University of California, Riverside.
I definitely believe that naps are an important part of a routine. Especially if you’re unable to sleep for the recommended amount of hours, which is most college and high school students. In my psychology course last year we discussed this concept called sleep debt. Sleep debt is essentially the cumulative hours of sleep you’re missing. So regarding the concept of sleep debt, Harvard states that you should add sleep onto your evenings or weekends, but I personally feel some sleep debt could be recovered through naps.
This blog post was super interesting and I really did enjoy it. Naps are near and dear to my heart. Through out high school I would nap right after school and before work. I always wondered if these naps were actually beneficial to take because I felt like it was wasting my time (even though napping was definitely my favorite activity). It was cool to learn that napping was positively correlated to learning ability. That definitely makes me feel better about napping everyday. I was also curious about whether shorter naps were better than longer naps and I’m happy that question was answered. I definitely feel better after taking a 90 minute nap but that may be purely because I feel 20 minute naps feel like my rest is being cut short. Whatever it may be, this blog post was really interesting and taught me a lot about my favorite activity!
I found this post to be incredibly interesting because I’ve often wondered about the benefits of naps and better sleep cycles ever since my psychology class in high school. I tried following the REM cycles of 90 minutes and I actually felt more awake. I am not sure if that is because of it acting as a placebo or if it was truly effective but I felt much more energetic in the morning! However probably the main reason I enjoyed this post is because I think I would fall under the 85% of mammals with daily naps. I would not be able to go throughout my day without them. I read further into this and I didn’t know that there were 3 types of naps for most mammals. The 3 types of napping are planned napping, emergency napping, and habitual napping. http://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/napping
I seriously enjoyed reading this post because I am one of those people that naps everyday. My friends would always make fun of me and say that I sleep way too much and I never get anything done because of it (which is totally not true). I am glad that there is scientific evidence proving that naps are helpful for our minds and memory. The only downfall of napping is if you do it for too long, sometimes you can’t sleep at night. Other than that, it seems like naps are important for humans and I’ll probably take one right after I’m finished posting this comment!