Who Needs a Good Excuse for a Nap?
I’ve often mentioned this in my talks but there’s a very good reason for making time every day for a nap. Are you surprised? It might seem strange to recommend a habit that’s usually associated with young children and older members of the community but the advantages apply to everyone. And that’s because it’s a perfectly natural way to improve your brain’s ability to perform efficiently. Let me shed a little light on the subject.
The more pressure, stress and responsibility you’re carrying, the more important it is to set aside time every afternoon for a restorative nap.
The best example I can share with you is the case of NASA test pilots. These highly skilled individuals are obliged to go to sleep for at least thirty minutes every afternoon in order to improve their cognitive function. In fact, research confirms that a thirty-minute snooze in the afternoon can boost cognitive function by around eighteen percent. That’s a major boost to your ability to think clearly, logically and creatively. The nap allows the brain to process, analyse and file data. You tend to wake up feeling refreshed and with a clearer head. The minimum sleep period in order for the nap to be effective seems to be twenty-seven minutes and it’s important to take the snooze before four in the afternoon. If you take a nap later in the day, it might interfere with your body’s natural, nocturnal sleep cycles. The companies who’ve introduced this facility into their daily routines typically set the half-hour break for three in the afternoon. If they couldn’t measure improvements in performance and wellbeing, they wouldn’t maintain the afternoon nap session for their employees.
At first glance, the idea might seem controversial because we’ve been conditioned to believe that a normal working day is based around an eight-hour period of dedicated effort and concentration. This is, of course, complete nonsense. We know that people are rarely effective for more than three hours a day yet we persist with the idea that daily work requires a minimum of eight hours of applied effort. The irony is that a thirty-minute snooze has a very positive impact on productivity so it would be wise and economically beneficial to adopt the practice as widely as possible.