Taking even a short nap during the day might sound like a luxury most of us can’t afford, but the upsides might make it worthwhile. Scientific research shows that napping has benefits extending beyond simple rest and restoration. What is napping anyway? It’s a short period of sleeping in the early afternoon and has benefits for your mental and physical health.
We value napping for how refreshed we feel when we wake up, but its physiological and psychological benefits run much deeper. Here are some surprising benefits you could get from an afternoon nap, ranging from cognitive enhancement to emotional regulation.
Cognitive Boost and Memory Enhancement
Short periods of sleep can enhance cognitive performance, especially memory, attention, and learning. A 2021 meta-analysis found that afternoon naps enhance cognitive performance among adults. When you take a short siesta during the day, it can make you feel more alert, make you a better problem solver, and even improve your short-term memory recall.
Why? Napping helps with memory consolidation, whereby the brain transfers information from short- to long-term storage. So, it makes sense to study and nap on it to enhance your recall.
Sleep experts think that naps, and especially those that include a phase of rapid eye movement, have an important function in enhancing creativity and problem-solving skills. REM is the stage of sleep during which vivid dreams happen, which is important for connecting previously unassociated ideas, thus boosting creative thinking. Even short naps that do not reach the stages of REM sleep may have cognitive benefits: they reduce mental fatigue and thus enhance concentration.
Emotional Regulation and Stress Relief
One of the benefits of taking a nap is the beneficial impact it has on emotional regulation, and how you process emotions. Ever noticed how you feel cranky and fly off the handle easier when you don’t sleep well? That’s your brain overreacting to situations. Lack of sleep can also trigger mood swings. When you nap, it helps reset your emotional circuits in areas of your brain, like your prefrontal cortex and amygdala. These areas of your brain manage stress and regulate your mood.
One study found that participants who napped for 30 minutes were better able to handle frustration and had improved emotional resilience compared to those who stayed awake. Napping also helps reduce levels of cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, which can become elevated due to fatigue. In this way, a short nap can serve as a natural stress reliever, improving mood and emotional well-being for the rest of the day.
Cardiovascular Health
Did you know that napping is beneficial for your heart? A study published in the journal Heart found that people who napped once or twice a week had a lower risk of experiencing cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes compared to non-nappers. It’s not surprising when you consider that sleep reduces stress and blood pressure, thereby taking some of the strain off your heart.
Research shows that being deprived of sleep, especially chronically, increases the risk of low-grade inflammation that can fuel cardiovascular disease. It also increases heart rate variability (HRV), a marker of cardiovascular risk. Here’s the good news. Even short naps of as little as 20 minutes can improve your heart rate variability and bring your blood pressure down.
Improved Physical Performance
Ask any athlete and they’ll tell you naps help them perform better in competitions. Taking short naps can boost your reaction time and give you the energy you need to push through when you train. Ever tried to train in a fatigued state? It’s not fun, and you probably didn’t perform your best. Napping is a chance for your neuromuscular system to rest and recover from the stress of training. Doing so may lower your risk of injury too.
One study that analyzed 12 studies relating to napping and exercise performance found benefits of napping on sports performance for all except one. They helped even if the subjects were not sleep-deprived or sleepy.
Enhanced Immune Function
Can an afternoon nap boost immune function? During sleep, your body produces proteins called cytokines. These proteins help modulate the function of your immune system, protecting against threats without going overboard and triggering inflammation. When you take a nap, you call these proteins into action. It’s a way to get a quick immune (and mental) reset. Taking a nap could be particularly beneficial during cold and flu season when threats abound. Naps also offer stress release, reducing cortisol, a stress hormone that reduces the ability to fight off pathogens.
Napping for Weight Management
Have you noticed how you eat more when you’re tired? You probably made worse food choices too. When you don’t get enough sleep or your sleep quality is poor, it disrupts hormones that cause you to feel full and satisfied, like leptin. For example, ghrelin, a hormone that gives you a powerful hunger and the munchies goes up. Taking a nap can help get your appetite hormones back in balance. Plus, you’ll feel less tired and less likely to impulse snack. In this way, naps may support healthier eating habits and contribute to long-term weight management. But it’s even more important to get a good night’s sleep.
Creativity and Problem-Solving
Creativity is a powerful tool for problem solving. Could napping help you make creative breakthroughs? Studies show that rapid-eye-movement sleep (REM) is a phase of sleep that helps you link together different ideas. So, it can help you solve problems in a creative way. It’s not surprising when you consider that REM sleep is a phase when your brain explores new ways to combine information and ideas.
A study found that participants who took a nap with REM sleep were more likely to solve complex problems that required creative thinking than those who stayed awake. In fact, they performed 40% better! The question is whether you’ll nap long enough to reach the REM stage of sleep. It takes between 30 and 60 minutes to enter REM, although you might enter it sooner if you’re sleep deprived. Yet even if you don’t nap that long, you’re rebooting your mental resources for better problem solving. Try it! You just might make a breakthrough!
The Ideal Nap Duration and Timing
Watch the length of your naps. Ten-to-twenty-minute naps are beneficial for boosting alertness and improving cognition. Once you get past 30 minutes, you enter deeper stages of sleep and could feel groggy when you awaken, a phenomenon known as sleep inertia. So, aim for quality rather than quantity when you nap. Make sure you’re in a comfy room without noise or disturbances.
Track your timing too. According to experts, napping between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM, when your body’s natural circadian rhythm takes a dip and you feel tired, is ideal. If you nap too late in the day, you could have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep at night.
Conclusion
If you need a brain boost, take a short nap. It’s more than a recharge, it’s a brain reboot. Doing so can boost your well-being and cognitive performance. By integrating naps into a balanced lifestyle, you can support both mental and physical health and, possibly, get more done the rest of the day.
References:
- Cousins JN, Wong KF, Raghunath BL, Look C, Chee MWL. The long-term memory benefits of a daytime nap compared with cramming. Sleep. 2019 Jan 1;42(1):zsy207. doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsy207. PMID: 30371902; PMCID: PMC6335868.
- Studte, Sara, Emma Bridger, and Axel Mecklinger. “Nap Sleep Preserves Associative but Not Item Memory Performance.” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 120 (February 27, 2015): 84–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2015.02.012.
- Lovato N, Lack L. The effects of napping on cognitive functioning. Prog Brain Res. 2010;185:155-66. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53702-7.00009-9. PMID: 21075238.
- Leong, Ruth L F, Nicole Yu, Ju Lynn Ong, Alyssa S C Ng, S Azrin Jamaluddin, James N Cousins, Nicholas, and Michael W L Chee. “Memory Performance Following Napping in Habitual and Non-Habitual Nappers.” SLEEP 44, no. 6 (December 12, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsaa277.
- Häusler, Nadine, Jose Haba-Rubio, Raphael Heinzer, and Pedro Marques-Vidal. “Association of Napping with Incident Cardiovascular Events in a Prospective Cohort Study.” Heart 105, no. 23 (September 9, 2019): 1793–98. https://doi.org/10.1136/heartjnl-2019-314999.
- Sports Performance Bulletin. “Sleep and the Athlete: Can Daytime Naps Power Performance?,” 2021. https://www.sportsperformancebulletin.com/injuries-health/endurance-health–lifestyle/sleep-and-the-athlete-can-daytime-naps-power-performance.
- EurekAlert! “Let Me Sleep on It: Creative Problem Solving Enhanced by REM Sleep,” June 8, 2009. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/696282.
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