UrbanUpdate

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When I found out in 2022 that I have a form of adult-onset muscular dystrophy, every doctor I spoke to asked the same question: Do you ever get really tired during the day? Yes, actually. I often find that I need to sleep a bit during the day just to make it past dinner. As I found out, the reason is due to hypersomnolence, a symptom that accompanies my disease. Suddenly I had an explanation for why I commonly felt the urge to nap.

Having some rare disease, of course, isn’t a prerequisite for wanting (or needing) to fall asleep during normal working hours. Being physically exhausted comes along with life’s drudgeries. Yet what I was experiencing, and continue to experience, made me wonder what the rules were for napping. How long should a nap be? Where should that nap take place? Is there a certain time during the day that’s optimal for napping? And then there’s perhaps the biggest question of all, which has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with culture: Only unemployed losers take naps, right?

“When I first started doing nap research in the early 2000s, naps were totally looked down upon. It was considered lazy,” says Sara Mednick, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life. “Actually, naps are just as powerful as a night of sleep for memory and motor-learning and emotional processing.”

To say nothing of the fact that if you are sleep-deprived, naps are a good countermeasure in the never-ending war against fatigue. So take a nap. But there are several things to consider beforehand.

Nap Time

Our bodies are governed by circadian rhythms. It’s our internal, 24-hour clock that tells us when to go to sleep and when to wake up, and keeping this clock in top shape helps with a variety of bodily processes, including digestion, body temperature, and hormone production and balance. It’s not something you want to throw off too much.

The general idea, then, is that no nap should be too long. “It’s not an exact science,” says Mary Ellen Wells, associate professor in the UNC School of Medicine’s Department of Health Sciences. “Naps aren’t for everyone, but if you do nap, keep them short, before 3 p.m., and have a comfortable space.”

If you ask an astronaut, that means a nap that concludes at the 26-minute mark. The number comes from a study conducted in the mid-1990s by NASA. Pilots who slept for 25.8 minutes saw their alertness jump by 54 percent. Their performance on certain tasks also improved by a third compared to pilots who didn’t nap. The NASA nap is a general guideline, but it’s a good one to follow.

“Napping less than half an hour is always going to be kind of a safe nap,” says Mednick. “You’re staying in stage two sleep, a light form of sleep, but one that’s good for alertness and beneficial for cognitive processes.”

Let’s say you do need a longer nap: Mednick strongly recommends that if you’re going to sleep for more than 30 minutes, then it’s best to stay napping for 90 minutes. That’s one full sleep cycle, where the body will go through all sleep stages: one, two, slow-wave sleep, all the way up to rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, a stage of deep sleep during which dreaming occurs.

Sleep the Gunk Out

Nap research shows that dozing off during the day will produce the same beneficial externalities of nighttime sleep. Memory, attention, executive functioning—all are improved by the occasional nap.

“Sleep is just very, very healthy. It’s good for your brain, good for your emotions, your health, and your heart,” Mednick says.

Some of the latest research even shows that a nap will boost your creativity. We all know this somewhat intuitively. If you’re stuck on a project (or an article), taking a rest is like a reset button for your brain. Erik Hoel, who authors “The Intrinsic Perspective,” a Substack publication that examines the intersection of sciences and the humanities, has written in the past about how sleep—and dreaming, especially—is a way to clear the clutter from our minds.

Meanwhile, research published in 2021 by the Paris Brain Institute showed that even the first two minutes of stage-one sleep, that you’re-kind-of-awake-but-also-kind-of-asleep feeling, ignites creativity. What’s most interesting is that this was something famous inventor Thomas Edison evidently knew. He allegedly napped holding spheres in his hands, which would drop noisily the instant his muscles relaxed. Upon hearing the noise, he would wake up and immediately jot down all the incisive thoughts that rushed into his brain.

Napper Beware

Because everything good in life seemingly comes with a caveat, naps aren’t unequivocally great. Naps can wreak havoc on nighttime sleep if you end up taking one late in the day or even a very long one earlier. But there’s something else to keep in mind.

“Everyone has a natural dip in their circadian rhythm in the early afternoon, but if you can’t resist the urge to nap on a regular basis, it’s time to talk to your doctor,” Wells says.

Excessive sleepiness during the day can be the sign of some sort of underlying problem. It might be a sleep disorder, like sleep apnea. Or it may be the symptom of some sort of undiagnosed comorbidity.

Such was my case when I finally discovered the root cause of my daytime sleepiness. But now, when I do nap, I follow the same set of guidelines. I keep them under 30 minutes. I try for a nap usually around 1 p.m. And I put myself in the most relaxing state possible: lights off, on the couch of my home office, with a Bob Ross painting video playing in the background.

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