Currently, I party quite a lot, and I have developed a sleeping schedule to allow me to do this while still working full time. So, every night I nap for a couple of hours after dinner, then (not every night but pretty much) go out. On weekends I stay out longer, but on weekdays I try to be in bed by two o’clock. I have the advantage of living close to where I work so I can sleep pretty late.
However, I’ve noticed that I feel kind of groggy after getting up from my naps, and I’ve been wondering if there’s a better way. My schedule leaves me feeling very energetic at night but kind of sluggish during the day.
How long should a nap be to leave you optimally refreshed? Would it be better to sleep after a meal or before a meal? Is there a best time of day for naps? Or would it be better not to take naps at all and get more continuous sleep instead?
I would think it varies from person to person. Personally, I’m an insomniac… a “good” nights sleep for me is 4 hours. As far as napping goes, I usually take the 20 minute “power nap”… anything more then if feel groggy.
BTW, normally I nap right after lunch (unemployed, so I can)… a full belly always makes me sleepy. Then again when I was working, I also took a nap… I was lucky, I had a HUGE cubicle and had a couch in there.
Salvidor Dali used to take naps during the day. He would go to sleep in a chair while holding a spoon over a metal plate. When he dozed off the spoon would fall from his fingers and wake him up by hitting the plate. He said that sleeping for the length of time it took the spoon to fall 18 inches was totally refreshing.
I’ve found that seven minutes of dozing- not quite falling asleep, but laying down and just kind of skimming the edge of sleep, wakes me up tremendously. Anything more than that and I get that logy feeling- where all I want to do is sleep the rest of the day away.
In college my Psych 101 professor had done a lot of research in this area. He said that the ideal is the 15-20 minute “power nap.” It gives your body and mind time to refresh, but it’s not so long that you enter deeper stages of sleep that are hard to wake up from and cause grogginess if you try. However, this only works if you get enough instances of uninterrupted long sleep, because your body requires some time in deep sleep and your mind requires some time in REM sleep, neither of which you’ll get in the power nap.
I’ll second the notion of the 20-minute nap seeming to be the most refreshing without leaving you groggy. The trick is figuring out what time will be 20 minutes after you fall asleep; I’m an insomniac as well, and can lie in bed for a good while before falling asleep, even when I’m dead tired.
For longer naps, I remember hearing that increments of 90 minutes allow you to complete one full sleep cycle, so that you wake up when it’s easiest to wake up from sleep and you get the full benefit from one cycle of deep sleep.
Yeah, I was going to say that 90 mins seems to be perfect, if you’ve got the time for it. It’s the closest to getting a full sleep cycle without suddenly waking up from a deeper stage or whatever. Either that, or under 30 mins.
OK, so the best length would be either so short that you don’t get any REM sleep (20 minutes), or one complete cycle (90 minutes), adjusted for the time it takes you to fall asleep. Why is it that waking up in the middle of a dream (that’s what REM sleep is, right?) makes you tired?
Also, is it better to sleep before eating or after? I notice that most people seem to become a little tired after a heavy meal. But people in siesta-taking countries have their naps before dinner, I think.
When I took Maas’s psych 101 course, his recently released book was a required text. I skimmed through it again to refresh my memory on the topic. I’ll try to provide a quick summary.
There are four stages of sleep; going from the lightest stage, stage 1 sleep, to the deepest stage, stage 4 sleep, and then back up through stage 1 sleep comprises a 90-minute sleep cycle. Stages 3 and 4, which begin roughly 30 minutes into a cycle, comprise deep sleep, when your body is in full recharge mode. It’s very hard to wake from deep sleep, and you feel very groggy when you do.
Once you’ve finished one cycle, you don’t go back into light stage 1 sleep again, but rather into REM (rapid-eye-movement) sleep, which is indeed the kind of sleep when you dream vividly. For sleep cycles beyond the first in one session, you need less deep sleep since you’ve already gotten some, so you get proportionally less deep sleep and more REM sleep per cycle, from twenty minutes for the first cycle to sixty for the fourth; your sleep will become almost entirely REM after seven hours or so. It’s theorized that this is the period during which you store your daily experiences into long-term memory. If awakened during REM sleep, you may remember a dream that you were having; if awakened during most other times you’ll often report your sleep as dreamless.
So to answer your questions, it’s actually the deep sleep that causes your grogginess. The reason for the 20-minute nap (the book says 15-30 minutes) is so you avoid going into deep sleep, but sleep for long enough that your body feels refreshed. The reason 90 minutes is good is so you can get some REM sleep out of your nap, and because you want to let your body shake off the “power saver” effects of deep sleep as much as possible. Of course, the shaking off isn’t complete, so you’ll feel groggier after the 90-minute nap.
Unfortunately, the book doesn’t discuss eating at all, besides noting that it can help in letting your body know what to set its internal clock to if you eat at regular times, and that certain foods may make it easier or more difficult to sleep.
