I have been taking 20-minute afternoon naps every day for the past 25 years,” says Suresh Pingale, 73, agriculturist and former president of the Rose Society of India. “I knew I was on the right track when I learnt that Sir Winston Churchill believed in afternoon naps too. I find that naps refresh me and allow me to keep up with my work and other commitments till 10.30pm at night. It’s like getting two days in one.”
Scientists have been studying afternoon naps for a while and in March 2012, a review of scientific articles on afternoon naps, Prioritizing Sleep For Healthy Work Schedules, was published in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology. The review by Masaya Takahashi, of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, Kawasaki, Japan, sheds light on how power naps help rejuvenate the body, mind and spirit.
Takahashi’s review found that studies on brief power naps of 15-20 minutes, taken in the middle of the workday, show an improvement in brain function by increasing our ability to learn and remember. A study in Academic Medicine in October, published after Takahashi’s review, had similar results. The sleep study was conducted by Avram Gold and colleagues at the division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine, Stony Brook University, Northport, New York, US, and they looked at the effects of a 20-minute afternoon nap on 29 first-year medical residents, a particularly sleep-deprived lot of professionals. The study found that the 18 medical residents who took a nap were far more alert and less error-prone for the rest of their workday compared to the 11 who stayed awake during that period.
And the length of the nap seems to be important.Read More
Sujata Kelkar Shetty, PhD, writes on public health issues and is a research scientist trained at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, US.