It’s best to snooze in the afternoons, “when we have a natural dip in alertness and tend to feel sleepy,” she added. Atwood said, keep it short - no more than 30 minutes - so it doesn’t interfere with your next night of sleep. If you find yourself in need of a nap, Dr. And similarly, they can help older adults if age-related changes such as needing to use the bathroom at night interrupt their sleep, Dr. Naps can also be particularly important for helping to keep those who don’t always work daytime schedules - such as airline pilots, commercial drivers, physicians or other shift workers - alert and sharp. If you usually work during the day, for instance, a 20- to 30-minute nap can restore alertness without leaving you groggy or disrupting your sleep the next night, Dr. “When you haven’t gotten a great night of sleep, napping can really help improve things like reaction time and memory if you need to be working,” she added. The upsides of nappingīut there are some instances where short naps can be helpful, Dr. Some limited evidence, for instance, has found that those who wake from the deepest phase of the sleep cycle are more likely to make mistakes on math questions than those who wake from REM sleep. Spencer said, not the deep, restorative sleep that you usually get throughout the night.Īnd while naps of more than 90 minutes may include some beneficial deep sleep, they will be more likely than shorter naps to leave you feeling groggy and potentially less sharp. Short naps of less than 90 minutes typically only include the lighter phases of sleep, Dr. Spencer said.Įven though a few hours of sleep at night and a nap during the day might add up to six or more hours total, she said, the health benefits don’t add up in the same way. But if you don’t consistently pass through all of these stages every night, she said, that can lead to a range of health conditions.Īnd naps can’t compensate for that, Dr. It’s normal to have a poor night of sleep every now and then, said Molly Atwood, a clinical psychologist and behavioral sleep medicine researcher at Johns Hopkins Medicine. It is not as deep as the third stage, but it’s when you’re most likely to dream and is thought to be associated with learning, storing memories and regulating mood. Rapid eye movement (or REM) is the last stage of the sleep cycle. The third stage, known as deep sleep, is when your eyes and muscles fully relax and your body does the important work of repairing and building bone, muscle and other tissues, as well as strengthening the immune system and consolidating and processing memories. Each is composed of four stages: The first two are considered light sleep, where your muscles relax, your body temperature drops and your heart rate and breathing slow as you doze off. When we sleep throughout the night, we pass through several “sleep cycles” of about 90 minutes. Spencer said, but also the quality of that sleep, which is determined by how much time you spend in its different stages. Not only is the length of time you sleep important for health, Dr. And that lack of sleep, experts say, is associated with a range of increased health risks, including for obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke and mental distress. The health benefits of good sleepĪccording to 2020 survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a third of adults in the United States don’t get the recommended seven hours or more of sleep every night. It’s important to understand that while a midday nap will probably replenish your energy enough to get you through your day, said Rebecca Spencer, a sleep science researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, it won’t necessarily negate the health risks that may come with insufficient sleep at night. And now you’re wondering if a quick lunchtime nap will give you the energy boost you need to power through the rest of the day, and potentially regain the health benefits of a full night’s sleep you may have lost. Maybe you stayed up too late scrolling TikTok, or tossed and turned because of anxious thoughts. Q: If I get less than the recommended seven or eight hours of sleep every night, will a midday nap make up for that loss?
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