The Science of Powernaps

This is a transcript of the first part of my ‘Power of Powernaps’ course on Insight Timer, for those who would like to read over the information in writing.

If you would like to purchase the course but you don’t have an IT membership, you can do so here. The first episode is free!

It’s possible that you feel a little bit guilty when you nap. Our societies look down on napping, while at the same time robbing us of our nocturnal sleep. 

Humans are the only animal species that tries to get all their sleep in one long stretch. All other animals are multiphasic sleepers, meaning they have two or more phases of sleep. We humans used to as well, before the industrial revolution, clocks, electrical lights and other inventions. 

Why is that? 

You may have heard about the circadian rhythm, your biological clock, This rhythm decides when our bodies want to sleep and wake, eat and move. It even regulates our temperature. In this circadian rhythm, there are two major dips in energy. One in the middle of the night, between 11pm and 1am, when we have our deepest nocturnal sleep, and one between 1 and 3 pm, when most of us experience a little post-lunch dip. 

It turns out it is not your lunch that makes you tired, it’s your internal clock. Think about it: if it were the food, wouldn’t you also feel like going back to bed after breakfast? 

Ideally, we would live harmoniously with our biological clock. But statistically, all of us are tired. Whether you’re north or south American, European, Asian or African, you’re likely getting less sleep than you’re supposed to, and you can feel this affecting you. 

A lack of sleep affects your digestion, your physical energy and your desire to move around, it affects your sex drive. But no single organ is as damaged by a lack of sleep as the brain. To think, your brain has to metabolise or digest glucose, that’s the brain’s food. Glucose comes into the brain via our blood circulation. Both blood flow to the brain AND the brain’s digestion of glucose are compromised when you don’t sleep enough. 

This can make you cranky, depressed, affect your decision-making, your attention span, how long it takes you to learn a new thing and even the food you want to eat. 

When we deprive ourselves of sleep, the brain goes in to a type of overdrive state. It sends signals to the body: we need extra energy! And so you crave high-fat, high-sugar, junk food. 

The symptoms of sleep deprivation are looking a lot like those of stress, aren’t they. We, meditators, take stress very seriously. We do all sorts of stuff to alleviate our stress. Let’s work on our sleep as well! 

And let’s focus on what we can do. 

Napping to the rescue! 

SO. What is a nap? 

A nap is a short period of sleep, anywhere between 15 mintues, for a so-called powernap, to 3 hours of sleep during the day. 

5 quick benefits of naps: they can increase your alertness, speed up your motor performance, help you make better decisions, help you with skin and tissue regeneration and elevate your mood. 

How does that work? 

Basically, it works the same way nocturnal sleep works. You may know that we sleep in cycles of around 90 minutes. In 90 minutes, we go through 5 stages of sleep. If we take a 90 minute nap, we get the benefits of all stages. 

So what are these stages?  

Stage 1 is the stage between sleeping and waking, it’s very short, usually only a couple of minutes. 

Stage 2 is the transitional stage, it happens between 1 and 3, between 4 and REM sleep, and again between REM sleep and stage 3. Stage two will help you be more alert, the most critical benefit of sleep. 

Stage 3 and 4 are slow wave sleep, this is the stage where you stop producing stress hormones and start producing human growth hormone. Slow wave sleep helps your body recover. 

The REM stage of sleep is that wacky stage where you dream. But it also helps your memory and creative thinking. 

If you are afraid of feeling groggy after a nap, don’t be. You feel groggy when you wake up in the middle of slow wave sleep. Your brain has to go from super slow, relaxed patterns to being awake and taking in lots of stuff. You can avoid this groggy feeling, called sleep inertia, by shortening your nap to maximum 20 minutes. First we have a couple of minutes of stage one and then at least 17 minutes of stage two before we tumble into slow wave sleep. You can also sleep past slow wave sleep if you get a full 90 minute nap. 

If you experience some grogginess after a nap, you can always fire up your brain with some physical activity or splashing water on your face. Keep a shot of caffeine to fire you up as a last resort.  

In this course, we will take shorter naps together, around 15 to 20 minutes. So you will mostly gain the benefits of stage 2 sleep, but you could always continue on with your nap after I stop talking in your ear. Its up to you when you set your alarm. 

When should we nap? 

Prime napping time, as most of you can intuit, is between 1 and 3 PM. This is when your body temperature is at its peak. We’ll call this the nap zone. 

If you prefer to sleep at another time, you totally can. 

Naps earlier in the day will be richer in REM, while late afternoon naps tend to be higher in slow wave sleep. If you want to increase your creativity, take an early nap. If you feel like one of the walking dead, a nice dose of slow wave sleep later in the afternoon will help you with the second part of your day. 

Remember that these are averages, numbers and estimates based on lab settings and experiments. You are not a research paper and your sleep does not exist in a sealed container cut off from the rest of our physical, mental and emotional being. If you experience any strange things during or after your naps, please do let me know, and I will do my best to answer any questions you may have. If you would like to go over this information in writing, you can find the transcript (and then some) on my website. 

Now, practically, how do we go about this napping? 

You can help yourself nap with the following things: safety, silence, dark, coziness and comfortable. So make sure you’re safe, it’s a bit dark where you are, you have some quiet, you feel nice and cozy and you can lie down or at least raise your feet. 

Try and keep your caffeine intake low up to four hours before you expect to sleep. In particularly high-pressure times, like before a big deadline, you could maybe try a caffeine nap, where you have a coffee and then go to sleep immediately, you get some sleep in the 20-30 minutes it takes to kick in, but I wouldn’t necessary recommend that for every day. 

Keep in mind, that you’re not lazy for wanting to nap. Your nap will make you more productive. You’re never too busy to nap. You don’t need to deserve rest or sleep, just like you don’t need to work to deserve to eat. It is your natural right as an inhabitant of this planet, to have a little break. 

So find a comfortable position, maybe close your eyes, slow down your breathing and just relax for a while. Don’t worry too much about falling asleep yet, just lie or sit there until you feel a bit more relaxed than when you started. 

I’ll talk to you again tomorrow for our first proper napping session.