#36 - Howz You (Post-Lunch Dip) Going?
If you have ever visited Australia, you may have been greeted with the phrase “Howz it going?”
This translates to “How Are You?”
And we do want to know if you’re OK. We don’t want to hear your life story - but we hope that you’re OK.
In 2020, many people are hoping others are OK, because there have been so many changes to our lives.
One of the minor changes we’ve heard about at WINK is that more people are napping.
This makes some sense due to the opportunity to lie down for a ‘kip’ in the afternoon (we inherited this slang off the Brits) when social isolating, quarantining, or WFH (ie, working from home) - or all of the above.
The topic of Napping brings me back to my PhD days.
Indeed, my very first job in sleep research was to observe the effect of napping on our body clocks. And around this time, I had a friend - Amber Brooks (nee Tietzel) - who was trying to discover the ideal power nap?
The Post-Lunch Dip
If you’ve purchased our Teen WINK (Circadian) you would have heard us refer to a little dip in our body clock in the middle of the afternoon - (and let me segue here by saying that we’re releasing a video soon to accompany Teen WINK so you know how to treat sleep problems in teens using a session-by-session format).
Well this little dip in the ‘arvo’ (Aussie slang for ‘afternoon’) is sometimes referred to as a ‘post-lunch dip’. As you can see from the figure below, it’s a little dip in our body clock - right after lunch.
What this means is that humans have a biological drive to nap in the afternoon.
It also means this afternoon dip is not because we ate some ‘tucker’ (Aussie slang for ‘food’) at lunch. If that was the case, we would have a dip after breakfast and dinner.
Fortunately in our 24/7 workaholic society, the post-lunch-dip is not very strong, so we can usually power through the afternoon and be productive.
And we usually consume copious amounts of caffeine in the first half of the day to also power through our 9-to-5 work schedule.
But we learned something interesting from this study I was part of way back in 1998.
We examined the post-lunch dip in 40 young people. We then got half of them to practice napping for a month, and then we examined their post-lunch dip again.
Their post-lunch dip became a ‘brick sh#thouse’ (Aussie slang for something ‘robust’ or ‘strong’).
This means, that their behaviour (napping in the afternoon) had an effect on their biology (as demonstrated with a deeper dip).
Many people notice the more we nap, the more we feel the urge to nap.
And most people would attribute this to simple learning. That could be true - but it is also because of our biology (just like many things about our sleep).
But is napping so bad?
There are obvious pros and cons to napping. Here’s some Pros:
I eventually feel better after having a nap
It’s nice to relax and have a nap in the afternoon
And here’s some Cons:
I miss out on doing things, or fall behind in my work
I feel worse (eg, lethargic) after a nap
My colleague Amber Brooks found a way to reap the benefits of naps without the cons.
She tested how long a power nap needs to be so that we feel the best afterwards.
In her study, she managed to compare a 30-min, 20-min, 10-min and 5-min nap against a ‘no-nap control’ condition.
And it was the 10-min nap that won hands down!
After an approx. 5-min of post-nap grogginess, the 10-min nap then showed improvements in alertness and performance for the following 3 hours.
From Brooks and Lack, SLEEP, 2006.
A future study by one of my Honours students Sara Dawson even showed that a 10-min nap in the afternoon does not mean you will fall asleep significantly later at night. Indeed, the bulk of the evidence shows napping doesn’t affect nighttime sleep (Buysse et al., Sleep Medicine, Reviews, 2015).
Moral of the Story?
If you’ve found yourself napping more - but you wish to strike a balance between the Pros and Cons, then the 10-min power nap is for you.
The next question is - how do I implement a 10-min nap?
Well I’m sorry to say that it looks like you haven’t subscribed to our 3x monthly newsletter to find out. Because our subscribers get that little bit extra. For example, we list a whole bunch of ‘bonza’ tips (Aussie slang for ‘awesome’) for making the 10-min nap work for them (and it’s not as simple as setting an alarm).
Actually, our email on this topic is going out several hours from now so you might be able to sneak in and subscribe (nudge, nudge, wink, wink … no pun intended).
If you missed out don’t worry mate. Just subscribe at the bottom of the page and you’ll get ‘heaps’ of tips (South Aussie slang for ‘a lot’) in the months and years to come!
Have a ‘Good One’ (aka, Aussie slang for Have a Good Day … and Night)!
-Prof Mike Gradisar