Stop pushing your brain and body to the limits. Extract peak performance out of your system by squeezing in a snappy shut-eye at work
If you can ever have a best friend that's always misunderstood and underestimated, napping is that.
At work, it is treated with contempt, associated with laziness and the power of its 20-odd minutes to rejuvenate your brain and body is so underrated that the only feeling you wake up to is guilt. The workaholic-loving, forever-wired life cycle that the Internet era has brought upon us, however, can't change the fact that napping is not just ingrained into our biology but also linked to better productivity.
Sleep simplified
As they sleep for short periods through the day, more than 85 per cent of mammals are polyphasic sleepers. Monophasic-sleeping humans divide days into two periods — of sleep and wakefulness. But scientists have found the biphasic pattern to work best for humans — a long stretch of sleep at night and a shorter siesta during the day. These help encounter two intense sleep periods, between 2 am and 4 am; and between 1 pm to 3 pm. This is why napping, the abridged version of which is called power napping, is key to spruce up our mood, memory, reaction time and alertness.
How naps help
You may feel putting in extra hours at work instead of dozing increases productivity, but it doesn't. Napping reverses information overload, brightens up your memory retention and heightens the senses, says Dr Jaleel Parkar, chest physician at Lilavati hospital who also consults at the hospital's sleep clinic. "Naps reboot our system much like a few cups of coffee or a round of yoga.
Our brain and body need time to recuperate from fatigue. Especially after lunch, when we feel the need to take a power nap, we must. A 20-minute nap lowers blood pressure and lessens heart load," he says. Little wonder then that countries with a siesta culture have a lower rate of heart disease. "I recommend having a big bowl of fruits after a light lunch to wake up fully energized," Parkar adds.
Dr Sandra, consultant respiratory physician at Andrews Hospital, says, "Napping improves concentration, relaxes your strained muscles and gives you relief from stress-induced neck-aches and backaches. However, too much napping can mask conditions such as sleep apnea." Besides, naps repeatedly used as substitutes for long, deep sleeps, will only result in stacking up your body's sleep deficit.
Productivity starts dipping the moment you feel the weight of your eyelids. Napping for 40 minutes, a NASA study found, increases alertness by 100 per cent and prepares you for the next 10 hours. However, when at work, if you nap for more than 45 minutes, you may suffer from 'sleep inertia' or grogginess.
As to why it improves mood, the answer lies in how the neurotransmitter serotonin regulates your mood, sleep and makes you feel content. Stress, on the contrary, drives our bodies to use higher levels of serotonin and also obstruct more of it from being produced. This explains the anxiety, irritability, depression and distraction the sleep-deprived suffer from.
Nap at work
While Indian organisations are yet to wake up to the benefits of napping, the West has been wise to this for some years. Nike workers use nap-friendly 'quiet rooms', while British Airways lets pilots sleep during long international flights as colleagues take over the cockpit. Tech giants are increasingly professing their love for napping. Google's Mountain View campuses have several 'energy pods' — sleek-looking white capsules in which nappers can recline out of others' sights.
In offices without such luxuries, the desk becomes your headrest. What works as effectively is the 'caffeine nap', where you chug some coffee and catch 20 minutes of shut-eye. This works because once the caffeine circulates through your body in about 20 minutes, it rids your body of adenosine, a sleepinducing chemical. The caffeine also revives you around the time you wake up. But if you must stay up through a night, ditch the coffee. Instead, pull off the 'prophylactic nap', where you take a preventive nap knowing you have to ride the small hours.
If you still seek inspiration, the list of nap-practitioners in history is exhaustive: Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Napoleon Bonaparte, John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. So forty winks to that, then.
Ride the shut-eye
The nano-nap
Duration: 10-20 seconds.
This happens on your commute, when you nod off on your passenger's shoulder.
The micro-nap
Duration: Two to five minutes.
This shoots down sleepiness pretty efficiently
The mini-nap
Duration: Five to 18 minutes.
This increases alertness, stamina, motor performance and learning.
The original power napDuration: 20 minutes
This packs in the multiple benefits of the micro and the mini naps, but also enhances muscle memory and clears the brain of useless data buildup, which helps with long-term memory.
The lazy man's nap
Duration: 50 to 90 minutes
This includes slow-wave plus Rapid Eye Movement sleep, and it improves perceptual processing. It also aids bone and muscle repair.
How to nap right
It's not hard to figure what time works best for your nap. If you are an early riser and early sleeper, nap at around 1 or 1.30 pm. If you hit the bed post midnight, your nap calls out to you around 3 pm. An hour before your nap, eat calcium and protein-rich foods as they promote sleep. At work, cut down your lunch time and use those 15 minutes to nap. The best way to fire up the benefits of a quick nap is to immediately break into a few stretches, pacing across the corridor or a quick bout of yoga that won't look awkward around colleagues.
