Exactly. I was horrified at first because I thought I was killing myself. Now I am a different kind of horrified…but I have been a napper for my entire life so there hasn’t been a change.
Yes, if you read my rant about the NYT, when that paper came out, their article was especially bad. WaPo discussed that the study found a correlation, and it was more probable that excessive napping was a symptom than a cause. WSJ had a brief piece mentioning a correlation. NYT had a scare piece about how maybe napping is going to kill you. I’m exaggerating. But i was really ticked off by the NYT coverage.
(There may be a little causation in both directions. It’s known that a stressed brain needs more sleep, and it’s almost certainly true that wanting to nap more is an early symptom of dementia. But it’s also true that napping can interfere with getting the kind of restorative sleep your brain needs to stay healthy. The study didn’t shed any light on that, it just found a correlation.)