Feeling Sleepy? Have a Nap. It's Good For you!

Here's a very valid case to have a power nap. Experts say an after-lunch snooze is good for you and your productivity.

If you’ve ever felt the need to rest your head on your work desk to secretly get a few minutes of post-lunch shut-eye while the boss wasn’t watching, it turns out you’re not lazy or disinterested. In fact, you are very normal.

According to Moira Junge, sleep psychologist and member of the Sleep Health Foundation, we were designed to require an afternoon kip to get through the day.

“We are all pre-programmed to need a little nap in the afternoon, explains Junge. “What happens with our body’s sleep mechanisms is that we have a post-lunch dip in our system and have a propensity to sleep.”

Junge explains the ‘post-lunch dip’ in our 24-hour circadian rhythm is like a sleepy switch that just flicks on in the afternoon. It’s independent of what we eat and of the amount we’ve slept the night before. This dip also gets repeated at night around 11pm and is the reason why some of us ‘crash out’ around that time.

“We are all pre-programmed to need a little nap in the afternoon. What happens with our body’s sleep mechanisms is that we have a post-lunch dip in our system and have a propensity to sleep.”

But, says Junge, what’s unique about this afternoon napping signal is that it’s temporary. It lasts 30 minutes to 1.5 hours before we go back to feeling alert again.

“If you don’t get an opportunity for sleep, say if you are at work, you can cycle through this dip quickly as your body’s systems will rise again, with or without a sleep if you can just manage to stay awake through it.”

Professor Leon Lack from the School of Psychology at Flinders University is pro-power napping and says if we can, we should. He reminds me that our need to nap in the afternoon is the reason why siestas are an accepted practice in many countries and explains that napping is a natural human habit dating back hundreds of years.

“We’ve become so fixed in our cultural habits of having a single nighttime sleep,” Prof Lack tells SBS. “This idea is a reasonably recent cultural adaptation from the industrial revolution and because of the advent of electric lights.

“Over 300 years ago, when most people were rural farmers, you probably had naps in the middle of the day and stayed up a little later at night but only so long as the fires burned in your house.”

So let’s say one day, our workplaces radically changed to become pro-napping zones. How long a kip should we have on our desk before the alarm rings? Junge says the trick is for the nap to be very short: 20 minutes is ideal, with time dedicated for you to fall asleep.

“If you sleep more than 20 minutes, you get into that deep slow wave of sleep where you can’t hear anything or wake up and don’t know where you are,” says Junge.

“That’s because the first 20 minutes of sleep are very light, stage one and two of sleep, and if you sleep for longer, you are more likely to have sleep inertia, where you wake up and feel worse or take a long time to ‘wake up’ and get going. Longer naps might also affect your sleepiness and ability to sleep at night. So short, sharp naps are recommended.”

Prof Lack goes even further to suggest that the average adult should be having 10 minute power naps in the afternoon, as needed, with a few minutes added to fall asleep.

He co-conducted research in 2006 comparing no naps with naps of five, 10, 20 and 30 minute durations. The 10-minute adult nap gave participants the biggest rise in alertness with the minimal amount of post-nap grogginess.

“With the 20 and 30 minutes sleeps, performance was impaired a little bit immediately after waking up for the first half hour or so,” says Prof Lack. “But the 10 minute naps produced significant benefits in cognitive performance.”

"Stop the struggle and have a quick kip so you can be more productive at work for the rest of the day.”

The moral of this dreamy story, Prof Lack suggests, is that if someone is really struggling with sleepiness in the afternoon, it’s likely they will continue on struggling for up to 90 minutes until they come out of ‘that dip’.

“So managers should find out what’s better for the worker. Is it better for them to be below par at work for 1.5 hours [during their afternoon dip] and potentially make mistakes? Or allow them 15 minutes – five minutes to relax and fall asleep and 10 minutes of napping – to increase the productivity for the remainder of that 1.5 hours?

“Napping could be considered beneficial if you are struggling with sleepiness in the day, commonly in afternoon and have a decline in alertness. Stop the struggle and have a quick kip so you can be more productive at work for the rest of the day.”

Both experts stress that this advice is general and that sleep needs vary according to individual needs and circumstances. They recommend that people with sleep disorders consult a GP and, if needed, see a sleep specialist.

This article originally appeared on sbs.com.au and was written by Yasmin Noone

11 Ways to Stay Energized All Day

Stuck Moment: It’s 3 pm and you’re down for the count. You’re tired, hungry, and cranky — longing for a venti-size, two-sugar latte. Sigh. Once again, the rest of this workday is going to be an unproductive drag.

But it doesn’t have to be. All that’s required are some small diet and exercise fine-tuning to sharpen that remarkable instrument you call your body. Because what you feed it and how you care for it affects the physical and mental factors that contribute to productivity: Mood. Confidence. Concentration. Energy. Memory. Your immune system.

Even better, these tweaks to your daily habits are so easy to implement that they can quickly become second nature — building a positive and lasting impact on what you can get done. Let’s get started.

Go easy on your digestive system. Digestion is work for your body. After you eat, increased blood flows to your stomach and intestines for the energy-hungry task of breaking food down — energy which then isn’t available for other kinds of work. Like brain work. On average, if you eat a mixed diet of carbs, proteins, and fats, 5% to 15% of the calories (a.k.a. energy) you take in are used for digestion. To compare, the brain uses about 20%.

While some foods, like fats and alcohol, take extra work to digest, others, such as a pastry or white toast with jam, break down easily to glucose (the sugar that fuels brain and muscles). You get a quick burst of energy (yay!). But as soon as 15 minutes later, you’ll crash (oh no!) and need another sugar-fix. Why? Because your brain needs glucose delivered in a steady supply to keep it running at its best.

The upshot: Eat the right foods, in the right amounts so that the energy produced isn’t “eaten” right back up by your stomach. And eat to control the release of glucose into your system to avoid the blood sugar roller coaster.

Here are five easy ways to do that:

1. Your morning meal helps set your blood sugar pattern for the day. What you want: fiber, slow-burning carbs, some fat, and some protein. Try a shake (soy, almond, or low-fat milk) with fresh or frozen fruit. Or an omelet with veggies and multi-grain toast.
2. Choose foods low on the glycemic index, which means that they burn slowly, giving your brain that nice even flow of energy. Choose toast with whole grains over a white bagel. A handful of nuts and dried fruit over a cookie. Here is a helpful chart listing high, medium, and low-glycemic foods.
3. Avoid heavy meals. That three-martini bistro lunch you see on Mad Men? Terrible for productivity. Instead, order salads, veggies, a high protein-to-carb ratio such as a baked potato with tuna or a light turkey sandwich. Go big on volume (to help you stay full) but judicious on calories (to help you stay perky).
4. If you do opt for fast-burning carbs, counteract them with fiber-rich foods — even a snack-size portion of carrot sticks can slow the release of sugar into your blood stream. Fiber also helps you stay full longer, so you don’t get distracted by cravings. Use this chart to check the fiber content of common grains, proteins, fruits and vegetables. (Berries and lentils are big winners in the fiber department.)
5. Avoid foods that you know make you feel sluggish or bloated. Gluten, dairy, and soy are common culprits.

Get into the focus and memory zone. We all know the feeling when our mind wanders and nothing sticks. You scan the same paragraph over and over. And just when you finally feel like you’ve got it and flip the page, whoosh! It’s gone.

The ability to concentrate and retain information, like your energy level, depends on how you tune your instrument. Studies show that diet and exercise choices not only affect mental alertness, but also memory formation. Fortunately, it doesn’t require a diet overhaul. There’s lots of easy stuff that you can do right now to make today (and tomorrow) work better.

1. Get in a half hour of low to moderate intensity aerobic workout. No need to cross-fit or marathon-train to get brain-boosting benefits. Instead of carpooling, take a brisk walk to work. Or jump on a bike. Or get on the elliptical, where you can review an important brief while your blood gets pumping. Exercise and learning are the perfect multi-tasking companions; working out during or just before a demanding learning task has been shown to improve memory or brain performance. 
2. Stay hydrated. A parched system can tire you and cause headaches, making it hard to concentrate. You know the drill: eight eight-ounce glasses of water throughout the day. And avoid the double-whammy of sodas and alcohol when you need to get stuff done: They dehydrate you and funk up your blood sugar and digestion.
3. In addition to plenty of water, eight foods that help you focus are blueberries, green tea, avocados, leafy green vegetables, fatty fish, dark chocolate, flax seeds, and nuts.

Tend to your immune system. On average, we get two to five colds a year. But studies show that it’s possible to halve your chances of getting sick with some simple choices.

1. Just 20 minutes of light to moderate exercise (enough to break a sweat) five days a week will boost your immune system. If you do catch a bug, researchers found that regular exercise can reduce the length and severity.
2. Eat lots of fruit, especially citrus, during cold season. The vitamin and mineral benefits boost your immune systems, and Vitamin C can actually help reduce the duration of a cold by a day.
3. Avoid suppressing your immune system with sugar and alcohol. These indulgences make you more vulnerable to bugs and can slow recovery.
4. Sleep well because when your sleep is out of sync with your schedule, your immune system suffers. When ready for bed, shut off screens — TV, smart phones, tablets, computers — and dim lights to cue your body for rest.

Boost your body to boost your mood. Confidence, stress, and happiness levels are hugely influenced by chemical and hormonal fluctuations in the body — i.e., diet and exercise. And they, of course, affect your productivity. These three actions will pump up your mood to power through your to-do list:

1. If you’re a non-morning person who needs to function in the A.M., eating breakfast regularly helps you avoid becoming tired and cranky. Eat something light — not too much fat, not too many fast-burning carbs — such as a shake with almond or soy milk and fresh or frozen fruit. And don’t eat until you’re fully alert, which is when your body is ready to start digesting.
2. Regulate your coffee intake. While caffeine can jolt you awake, too much at the wrong time, like early morning on a empty stomach, can kick you into an adrenalin overload, stressing your system, and leaving you with the jitters or mood swings. However, an afternoon coffee (go easy on the sugar) is a good offset to the slowness caused by a heavy lunch.
3. Finally, there are so many benefits to exercise that there’s really no reason not to. For instance, just 20 minutes of walking or other mild workout will boost endorphins and other chemicals that give you a feeling of euphoria, help your body and mind reset, and leave you feeling clearer and fresher.

This article originally appeared on unstuck.com and was written by Unstuck