The Science Behind What Naps Do For
Your Brain--And Why You Should Have One Today
….studying
through the night, such as cramming the night before an exam actually decreases
the brain’s ability to absorb information by almost 40%
Studies
of napping have shown improvement in cognitive function, creative thinking, and
memory performance. Ready, set . . . snooze.
Naps
aren’t for everyone, though. I’ve heard lots of people say naps don’t make them
feel better, so I wanted to explore how naps affect your brain and whether they
really are good for you or not.
Better sleeping is known to provide lots
of health benefits. These can include better heart function, hormonal
maintenance and cell repair as well as boosting memory and improving cognitive
function. Basically, sleeping gives your body a chance to deal with
everything that happened during the day, repair itself, and reset for tomorrow.
Sleep deprivation, therefore, actually harms us in several ways. One of the most obvious harms is that we have trouble focusing when we’re sleep deprived. Buffer cofounder Leo Widrich wrote about this before:
Sleep deprivation, therefore, actually harms us in several ways. One of the most obvious harms is that we have trouble focusing when we’re sleep deprived. Buffer cofounder Leo Widrich wrote about this before:
Someone who is severely sleep
deprived is in fact as attentive and awake as you are. With one big difference
to you. Here is what a recent study found: The sleep deprived person can in
fact deliver the exact same results as someone who isn’t sleep deprived in any
exercise. That is, given it is a non-repeated exercise and they give it their
best shot. Odd right? Now onto this though:
The problem lies elsewhere. Whether
we are sleep deprived or not, we lose focus at times. And that is precisely
where the sleep deprived person lands in a trap. Once we start to lose focus
and have received the right amount of sleep, our brain can compensate for that
and increase attention. If we are sleep deprived, our brain can’t refocus.
The benefits of napping
Studies of napping have shown improvement in cognitive
function, creative thinking, and memory performance. As I mentioned in my post
about the body clock and your body’s best time for everything, we’re naturally designed
to have two sleeps per day:
The
idea that we should sleep in eight-hour chunks is relatively recent. The
world’s population sleeps in various and surprising ways. Millions of Chinese
workers continue to put their heads on their desks for a nap of an hour or so
after lunch, for example, and daytime napping is common from India to Spain.
Naps
can even have a physical benefit. In one study of 23,681 Greek men over
six years, the participants who napped three times a week had a 37% lower risk
of dying from heart disease. Not to mention a host of other positive outcomes that might occur from regular napping:
Sleep
experts have found that daytime naps can improve many things: increase
alertness, boost creativity, reduce stress, improve perception, stamina, motor
skills, and accuracy, enhance your sex life, aid in weight loss, reduce the
risk of heart attack, brighten your mood and boost memory.
Memory
Naps have been shown to benefit the learning process, helping us take in and retain information better. In one study, participants memorized illustrated cards to test their memory strength. After memorizing a set of cards, they had a 40-minute break wherein one group napped, and the other stayed awake. After the break, both groups were tested on their memory of the cards, and the group who had napped performed better:
Naps have been shown to benefit the learning process, helping us take in and retain information better. In one study, participants memorized illustrated cards to test their memory strength. After memorizing a set of cards, they had a 40-minute break wherein one group napped, and the other stayed awake. After the break, both groups were tested on their memory of the cards, and the group who had napped performed better:
Much to the surprise of the
researchers, the sleep group performed significantly better, retaining on
average 85 percent of the patterns, compared to 60 percent for those who had
remained awake.
Apparently, napping actually helps
our brain to solidify memories:
Research
indicates that when memory is first recorded in the brain--in the hippocampus,
to be specific--it’s still “fragile” and easily forgotten, especially if the
brain is asked to memorize more things. Napping, it seems, pushes memories to
the neocortex, the brain’s “more permanent storage,” preventing them from being
“overwritten.”
Learning
Taking
a nap also helps to clear information out of your brain’s temporary storage areas, getting it ready for new
information to be absorbed. A study from the University of California asked participants to
complete a challenging task around midday, which required them to take in a lot
of new information. At around 2 p.m., half of the volunteers took a nap while
the rest stayed awake.
The
really interesting part of this study is not only that at 6 p.m. that night the
napping group performed better than those who didn’t take a nap. In fact, the
napping group actually performed better than they had earlier in the morning.
The
lead researcher, Dr. Matthew Walker . . . said the findings support the idea
that sleep is a necessary process that clears the brain’s short-term memory
storage so there is room to absorb new information.
The
same research team had found earlier that studying through the night, such as
cramming the night before an exam actually decreases the brain’s ability to
absorb information by almost 40%, which makes sense in light of this newer
research into the effect of a nap on
the brain’s learning abilities.:
Walker likened the process to having
an email inbox in your hippocampus. This gets full, and you need to sleep to
initiate the clearing-out process. Until you do, then the mail stays in the
inbox and you can’t take in any more.
“It’s just going to bounce until you
sleep and move it into another folder,” said Walker.
Dr.
Walker also mentioned how these findings mean
napping before learning is as important as it is afterwards:
Sleep prepares the brain like a dry
sponge, ready to soak up new information.
Avoiding burnout
A study from Massachusetts
showed how napping can help your brain recover from ‘burnout’ or overload of
information:
To see whether napping could improve
visual discrimination, a team led by Robert Stickgold, a neuroscientist at
Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had college students who were
not sleep deprived stare at a video screen filled with horizontal bars.
Periodically, three diagonal bars flashed in the lower left corner of the
screen, and the students had to say whether these bars were stacked
horizontally or vertically. The researchers graded students’ performance by
measuring how long the diagonal bars had to be shown in order for them to
answer correctly 80% of the time.
Students sat through 1,250
frustrating trials during each session, so those who did not nap did worse and
worse over the course of the day. But students who took a 1-hour nap returned
to their original performance levels in the next test.
The researchers in this study also
experimented with moving the diagonal bars into different areas of the screen
after several tests, which resulted in participants performing as well as they
did at the beginning. Stickgold said this pointed out how quickly our brain’s
visual centers become overloaded, since only three tests were enough to see a
decrease in performance that could be overcome by changing the placement of
visual input:
Burnout is a signal that says you
can’t take in more information in this part of your brain until you’ve had a
chance to sleep.
Another study showed that a 60– to 90-minute nap could be
as good as a full night’s sleep for learning a visual perception skill. It
seems as though our eyes are getting a lot of rest and repair when we’re
asleep!
The
benefits of a nap can even last for several hours, according to Professor
Leon Lack from Flinders University:
Ten to 15 minutes of sleep seems to
be the optimum period in terms of improving mental operations, performance,
reaction times and subjective feelings of alertness. And that improvement in
performance and alertness seems to be maintained for up to two and sometimes
three hours after the nap. Interestingly, the five-minute nap just didn’t
produce the same amount of improvement, while longer naps of 25 to 30 minutes
led to subjects being somewhat drowsy and less alert for up to an hour after
the nap.
Some
recent research has found that the right side of the brain is far more
active during a nap than the left side, which stays fairly quiet while we’re
asleep. Despite the fact that 95% of the population is right-handed, with the
left side of their brains being the most dominant, the right side is
consistently the more active hemisphere during sleep.
The study’s author, Andrei Medvedev,
speculated that the right side of the brain handles ‘housekeeping’ duties while
we’re asleep. The study looked at how active various parts of the brain were
while participants were sleeping:
Medvedev and his colleagues used a
type of brain imaging known as near-infrared spectroscopy, which involves
placing optical fibers similar to electrodes symmetrically around a person’s
scalp. These “optodes” send infrared light through the brain and measure how
much light returns.
The intensity of light bouncing back
provides an estimate of the blood flow in different regions of the brain. Blood
flow, in turn, is an indicator of how active those regions are.
So while the left side of your brain
takes some time off to relax, the right side is clearing out your temporary
storage areas, pushing information into long-term storage, and solidifying your
memories from the day.
How
to get the most from your nap
It’s true that I’m a big proponent
of naps now, but I wasn’t always. In fact, I was once vehemently opposed to
napping, because I found that I was generally groggy and felt even more tired
when I woke up from a nap.
The trick, I’ve found, is to work
out what kind of nap suits you best. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of trial and error, but I
definitely think it’s worth it. Here are some tips to help you work out the
best way to get the most from your nap:
1. Learn how long you take to fall
asleep
If you’re trying to nap for a
specific amount of time, you definitely need to factor in the length of time it
takes you to get to sleep. If you need some help to work this out, you could
try using a fitness tracker like the Jawbone UP, or a sleep-tracking app on
your phone. Once you have a rough idea, you can factor this into your napping
time.
When I set an alarm to wake me up
from a nap, I normally set it five to 10 minutes longer than I want to sleep,
since this is about how long I take to get to sleep. If I’m still awake after
15 or 20 minutes, I reset my alarm and start over. Having an alarm set lets me
relax knowing that I won’t fall asleep for hours and wake up groggy around
dinner time.
If you don’t want to set an alarm,
you could try this trick Michael Hyatt shared
on his blog:
“Every day after lunch, I lie down
on the sofa in my office,” he recounted. “I hold my car keys in my right hand
and let my hand hang toward the floor. When the car keys fall out of my hand, I
know I’m done.” (Evidently, the famous artist Salvador Dali had a similar
practice.)
2. Don’t sleep too long.
Sleeping for the wrong length of
time is exactly what made me hate naps originally. The problem is that this can
give you sleep inertia--that feeling of waking up groggy and even more tired than you
were before.
Dr. Sara C. Mednick who wrote Take a Nap! Change Your Life says sleep
inertia happens when you wake up during deep, slow-wave sleep.
Since brain temperature and blood flow to the brain decrease during this sleep stage, it’s jarring to suddenly be awake and experiencing much higher rates of brain activity.
Since brain temperature and blood flow to the brain decrease during this sleep stage, it’s jarring to suddenly be awake and experiencing much higher rates of brain activity.
There is no benefit to napping
longer than 90 minutes, because you will only begin another sleep cycle.
Further, if you take a snooze too late in the day, it will contain too much
slow-wave sleep.
Limit your nap to 15 minutes. A half
hour can lead to sleep inertia, or the spinning down of the brain’s prefrontal
cortex, which handles functions like judgment. This gray matter can take 30
minutes to reboot.
The
consensus across most of the research I dug up seemed to be either to go for a
short, 15– to 20-minute nap, perhaps with a cup of coffee beforehand to wake up
with more energy or to sleep for a full 90-minute sleep cycle, and wake up before your next cycle starts.
3. Choose the right time of day.
Napping
when your energy levels are naturally decreased can help you avoid the dreaded infinite-hour feeling, where the day drags on as you try to ignore
your sleepiness. This is usually sometime after lunch for those of us who work
on a traditional 9–5 schedule:
Because
of the natural cycles of our circadian rhythms, we are at our most tired twice
during a 24-hour period. One peak of sleepiness is usually in the middle of the
night, so the other, 12 hours later, falls smack-dab in the middle of the
afternoon.
If
you’re sleep deprived from the night before,
you’ll feel this dip in energy even more strongly and be more inclined to nap.
Rather than fighting it off with energy drinks or coffee, try a short nap to
refresh your brain before taking on the afternoon.
4. Practice
The
best way I’ve found to get better at napping is to practice. Figuring out what
works for you can take a while, so try experimenting with different times of the day, different nap lengths and
different ways of waking up (if you’re worried about grogginess, you could try
an app like Warmly, which wakes you up
slowly, or a sleep-tracking app like Sleep Cycle to wake you up during
light sleep).
Don’t forget to set up your napping
space with as little light as possible and grab a blanket to keep you warm
while you’re asleep. Good luck!
--By: Beth Belle Cooper
http://www.fastcompany.com/3017356/work-smart/the-revealing-science-behind-what-naps-do-to-your-brain-and-why-you-should-have-o?partner=newsletter
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