To Nap or Not to Nap: Is That the Question?
"If you didn't sleep so much, you wouldn't be so sleepy!"
Did you ever hear such advice from well{?}-meaning friends or relatives?
In the parlance of social medicine, this kind of penetrating diagnostic formulation falls under the heading: "Blaming the Victim."
Its numerous derivatives serve many useful purposes. Just one of these is to dismiss a person's problem by alleging that the sufferer could solve it easily by a simple act of will power.
Consider a rebuttal: "If you didn't eat so much, you wouldn't be so hungry!"
Nonsense, right? But even on this reductio ad absurdum, not everyone would disagree!
So, what about naps? Are they mostly a symptom of laziness? Or are they a good idea, as people in "siesta" countries seem to believe?
The truth may lie in different answers, depending on the situation and the type of nap.
The latest issue of Sleep, a medical journal specializing in research on sleep and its disorders, brought this to mind. One article should interest even people without disorders of excessive sleepiness. It dealt with the effectiveness of naps in overcoming the effects of sleep loss.
[Note: To be exact, the lengthier actual title is "Maintenance of Alertness and Performance by a Brief Nap After Lunch Under Prior Sleep Deficit," authored by Masaya Takahashi DMSc and Heihachiro Arito DMSc, of the National Institute of Industrial Health in Kawasaki, Japan. The article can be found in Volume 23, Number 6, pages 813-819, in an issue dated September 15, 2000.]
In essence, the researchers had 12 young, healthy students limit their sleep to only 4 hours for one night, on two occasions. The following day, each subject had either no opportunity to nap, or 15 minutes in bed available to nap right after lunch (from 12:30 to 12:45 p.m.).
Both before and after lunch, at intervals of about 1.5 hour, subjects completed tests of memory and logical reasoning, and rated their own subjective sleepiness. After a nap averaging 10 minutes in duration (measured by sleep polysomnography), they felt less sleepy, and performed better on logical reasoning, than without a nap.
Like a lot of clinical research, this study serves to confirm what some might consider obvious, but it surprised me to learn that even a nap as short as 10 minutes could reverse the adverse effects of losing half a night's sleep.
On the other hand, haven't the virtues of a brief nap been proclaimed by the personal experience of at least one President?
Excessive sleepiness during the day most often results from people just not allowing themselves enough time in bed to get the normal 8 hours of sleep. In this commonplace situation, short naps seem to serve a useful purpose.
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