#40 - How to Power Nap
“Try and fall asleep” said my friend as she turned off the light and shut the bedroom door.
“Right! How am I supposed to fall asleep when I’ve got all these electrodes stuck to my scalp and I know someone’s reading my brainwaves!”
But as part of this experiment I volunteered for, I had to restrict my sleep the previous night to only 5 hours - so I was feeling a bit sleepy.
This experiment was aimed at finding out what was the perfect nap duration.
This meant coming into the sleep lab on 5 different afternoons - 1 week apart. And each time leading up to 3pm, I was asked to fall asleep.
I was either going to get 30-min to nap, or 20 min, or 10 min, or 5 min - or no nap (this meant the minute I fell asleep I was going to be woken up - and the purpose of the ‘no nap’ was to see how much extra minutes of sleep was needed to produce the ideal power nap).
To be honest, I didn’t know which nap my friend - Amber Brooks - was going to give me each time I went into the sleep lab. And I was never told afterwards.
Sometimes it felt like I fell asleep. Other times it didn’t.
But I became aware of what happens when we start to fall into light sleep.
Thoughts were still going through my head - but they were a bit jumbled up. And it felt a little bit like time had passed a bit quicker.
So What Was The Perfect Nap Duration?
10 minutes.
After all these naps, I was given a bunch of cognitive tests to assess my functioning.
These tests showed that after most naps there was a bit of grogginess for about 5-15 minutes.
But compared to the ‘no nap’, alertness, the speed of processing information, and mood improved over the following 3 hours.
And it was the 10-min nap that was the best of all.
That dotted line across the top is the 10-min nap - and SDST stands for ‘Symbol Digit Substitution Test - it measures how quickly we can process information - so this shows the 10-min nap leads to more efficient thinking within an hour after the power nap.
Should you Nap?
Blog #38 detailed the effective 1970s insomnia treatment called ‘Stimulus Control Therapy’. And part of the instructions are not to nap.
There’s also a bunch of sleep tips - that together - are called ‘Sleep Hygiene’. And one of these tips is not to nap.
So this begs the question - should one nap if they haven’t slept well?
The reason why napping is discouraged is because it is supposed to affect your ability to fall asleep at night.
But this suggestion assumes people have a long nap.
Does A Power Nap Affect Your Nighttime Sleep.
In 2005, an Honours student of mine - Sara Dawson - tested whether a 10-min power nap makes it hard to fall asleep that night.
What did she find?
That it didn’t.
She gave volunteers either a 10-min power nap - a ‘no nap’ - and a 60-min nap.
Strangely, all 3 naps didn’t affect the time taken to fall asleep. That’s right. Not even the 60-min nap!
What she did find, was that the naps did mean that deep sleep took longer to occur at night - even after a 10-min nap.
What’s the difference between a Power Nap and a Long Nap?
Amber Brooks found that when people have a 10-min power nap, that we begin to get brain waves that occur during deep sleep. These are known as delta waves.
But although we get delta waves in a power nap, there’s not enough of them - so we don’t actually get deep sleep.
But when we nap for 30-min or more, we get enough delta waves and thus we get deep sleep in our naps.
In this way, we can say that a long nap is 30 min or longer.
And since Amber’s and Sara’s research, there have been other studies that show a 20-min nap is helpful. Thus, we could say that a power nap is 20-min or less.
How to Power Nap?
It took me a longer than most people to know what ‘click bait’ is (my sons and wife keep me up-to-date with the lingo).
So this is where the blog post ends … but if you wish to know the answer to this question, you’ve got some time to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to find out.
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Prof Mike Gradisar