Once frowned upon as a lazy worker’s waste of time, scientific investigation is waking up to the benefits of daytime naps, which not only refresh the mind, decreases irritability but also boost worker productivity in offices and at homes. If you don’t nap in the day when you desperately need one, your productivity can often drop upward of 30 percent. Most of us, however, avoid it and are unwilling to talk because of the stigma attached to it. “But the fact is that napping is a highly restorative process," says Richard Gelula, executive director of the National Sleep Foundation, Washington DC.
People who advocate daytime napping often quote Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and George W Bush for their famed post-lunch snoozes. If these naps brought reversal in one’s progress, all these men would not have stood upright in history. After all, do we ever talk of people who haven’t made it big in their lives?
Some recent studies point that a daytime nap, termed as a cat nap too, can be as refreshing as a good night's 8-hour sleep. Research carried out at the Harvard University indicates that a 60-to-90-minute siesta can sizzle the brain's batteries as good as an eight hour crash-out session during the night, according to a report in The Telegraph. From the perspective of behavioral improvement, a nap is as good as a night of sleep for learning on a perceptual task, Dr Sara Mednick, leading the research said.
The study testing the visual learning ability of volunteers involved watching and then recalling the position of bars on a computer screen, during 9:00 A.M. and 7:00 P.M. and again at 9:00 A.M., the following day. The test scores of volunteers not allowed to sleep during the day slipped by the evening of the first day. But the reaction times of people who took a 60-to-90-minute quick reprieve during the day improved in the evening,
The study concluded that taking a nap after learning a difficult task might help you perform better. Some of previous studies have already found that naps can improve alertness, productivity, and mood, but researchers say less is known about how daytime naps affect learning. However, it is very exciting to note how ancient Indian physicians, as Charaka and Vaghbhata, knew of the mechanism of daytime naps. Charaka, in Charaka samhita, gives specific recommendations on catnaps for people of different prakruti’s or body natures. The ancient Ayurvedic text is also replete with descriptions on who is likely to have a tendency for daytime naps and who is not. Body doshas or humors like vata, pitta>, and kapha come into consideration.
Ayurveda states that sleep is one of the supporting pillars of the life. Good nourishment and emaciation, strength and debility, happiness and unhappiness, health or illness is dependent on sleep to varying degrees. It recommends daytime sleep only in summers. In summer vata dosha undergoes an increase and causes dryness which can be countered by an occasional nap in the day. Exhausted, angry or grief-stricken individuals, old people, and children are recommended to sleep at daytime. On the contrary if you are habitual of daytime sleep, withdrawing from it suddenly can harm your health. This is particularly true for the elderly who remain as healthier by having daytime naps, as they are unhealthy when they lose it.
A research at the Department of Behavioral Sciences, Hiroshima University, Japan, even demonstrated the restorative effects of a short afternoon nap of less than 30 min in the elderly on subjective mood, performance and cardiac activity. The nap significantly reduced subjective sleepiness and fatigue in the afternoon in case of the subjects. It also improved their performance levels. These findings suggested that the afternoon naps helped the elderly maintain their daytime psychological, behavioral and physiological arousal at an adequate level.
As a matter of fact then, daytime nap might actually be a very good and cost-effective idea to do away with fatigue and thus help us reduce 100,000 police-reported highway crashes causing 71,000 injuries and 1500 death each year in the United States. Stay healthy.
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