 Hey everyone, Dr. O here. So if you want better sleep you have to answer this question, to nap or not to nap. So what if you've done all that you can to get a good night's sleep? Where does napping fit into a healthy sleep lifestyle? I get questions about naps all of the time. The problem is there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to naps. It is highly individualized and personal. Naps are like supplements. They can't replace the real deal a good night's sleep, but they can help fill in the gaps. So a lot of cultures, including traditional hunter-gatherer cultures, would sleep or slept six to seven hours at night and then took a siesta in the afternoon. You can make an argument that that is how we are designed to sleep biologically. This sleep pattern would help avoid being too active during the hottest part of the day. But if it doesn't fit into most of our schedules, right, to sleep and have a siesta, unless you live in a place where there is a siesta culture, so a close second would be one solid block of seven to nine hours of sleep per night. But if naps and siestas are so good, why might they also be a bad idea? It all has to do with adenosine. So you haven't heard of this yet in the course, but we'll talk about in a few other places as well. So adenosine is a waste product of your metabolism. Think of it like the sand in this sleep hourglass. The longer you've been awake, the more metabolically active you've been, the more adenosine is going to build up. And this leads to what's called sleep pressure. So sleep pressure is caused by the buildup of adenosine while you are awake. So the longer you've been awake and the more physically active you've been, the more your metabolism has been churning away, the more you're going to be building up this adenosine. And adenosine is one of the main signals that tells you to go to sleep. So here's the rub. Napping lowers adenosine levels by flushing it out of your system. This is why naps can make you less tired. But this could also be why you're having trouble falling asleep at night after taking a nap. So if you flush adenosine out of your system, you might feel better now, but there might not be a full load of adenosine when you try to go to bed. So you might not be able to build up enough sleep pressure to go to sleep at night. What about caffeine? So you'll see later. We'll talk about caffeine in great detail later, but caffeine blocks adenosine. It doesn't remove it, right? So caffeine hides adenosine from your brain temporarily, whereas napping actually flushes it out of your system. So caffeine should be able to decrease how tired you feel without impacting your sleep in the same way that naps would as long as the caffeine is out of your system by bedtime. Because you don't want to be flushing out too much adenosine to have trouble sleeping at night. But you also don't want to be hiding adenosine with caffeine when you're trying to sleep at night. So stay tuned for a lot more about caffeine. So here's a study. What does the science say? Napping in college students and its relationship with nighttime sleep. This is a study of 440 college students. And the students that had the poorest nighttime sleep quality had these issues here. They reported taking three or more naps per week. Number one. Number two. Those who napped for more than two hours at a time. And number three. Those who napped late, which meant between 6 and 9 p.m. So basically, the more napping rules you break, the worse naps are for you. Another study. Risk of napping, excessive daytime sleepiness, and mortality in an older community population. So this study found that older adults who napped frequently had lower quality nighttime sleep. They were flushing adenosine out of your system and then it wasn't there when they needed it to go to bed at night. They also had more symptoms of depression and they had less physical activity. They were also more likely to be overweight or obese than the people who rarely took a nap. Another one. Association of nap frequency with hypertension or ischemic stroke supported by prospective cohort data and Mendelian randomization in predominantly middle-aged European subjects. So this is a very important observational study because it showed that frequent or usual daytime napping in adults was associated with a 12% higher risk of high blood pressure or hypertension and a 24% higher risk of having a stroke compared to people that never napped. Results also showed that if napping frequency increased by one category, which means that people went from never napping to sometimes napping or sometimes napping to usually napping, their risk of high blood pressure increased by 40%. So needing naps increased risk of high blood pressure and stroke, needing more naps increased risk of high blood pressure even more. So what is this saying? What is this really saying though? Studies that show that napping is bad for you are really missing the point. I would argue that needing to nap is bad for you because it means you slept poorly the night before. If you had a great night of sleep the night before, you wouldn't need to nap. So here's the key. If napping makes you feel better and doesn't hurt your sleep at night, then go for it. If napping makes your sleep worse at night in any way, then stop immediately. You don't want to trade a nap for poor sleep that night. So the key is honestly though trial and error. I can't tell you what to do here. Personally, I am a terrible napper like this person here. I stare at the ceiling and then I give up. And if I do fall asleep, I feel worse when I wake up. So if you are going to try napping, what do you do? The ideal length of a nap is between 10 and 26 minutes. A 1995 study done by NASA said that 26 minutes was ideal. So why so short? Well, if you sleep a few minutes, that can restore your nervous system. But the longer you sleep, now your body is like, oh, we're going to bed. So now hormone levels are going to shift. And if you start changing hormone levels, it takes a long time for them to come back. That's me when I wake up from a nap. I have this massive amount of sleep inertia that I have to overcome, which is why I feel worse. So short naps are better. 10 to 26 minutes is ideal. Another interesting strategy is to have some caffeine before your nap to help you be more alert when you wake up from it. Just be super careful with caffeine in the afternoon. Right, we'll talk about caffeine a lot more later. When else is napping a good idea? We've already talked about one. It's better to stick to your normal wake-up time on the weekend and then take a short nap during the day if you need to. So if you do stay up later on Friday or Saturday night, for example, still wake up at your normal wake-up time and then use a nap sometime early in the day to make up for that loss of sleep. That's another time when naps are a good idea. Here's a really important time for naps. So another tip. If you're chronically sleep-deprived, like a parent with young children, then get your sleep whenever you can. So I love this quote here. People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one. Anyone that's ever been a parent knows what that's talking about. Here's the key. Naps are only bad if they replace a good night of sleep. If you're not going to get a good night of sleep anyhow, then take your naps whenever possible. If naps are helping and possible, don't stop taking them unless you are going to make up for it by getting more sleep at night. There's some research about what happened in Greece where they kind of got rid of the siesta culture, so they were used to sleeping six hours at night and then taking their siesta in the afternoon. They removed the siesta and their health got worse because they didn't replace the nap by sleeping seven to nine hours at night. They were still sleeping six hours at night, but then they were no longer taking their nap. So if naps are helping and possible, use them and don't stop taking them unless it improves your sleep quality and you plan on getting better sleep at night. So what are the key takeaways here? Honestly, naps are a double-edged sword. Naps are most effective if they are short, they're early in the day, and they have zero impact on your sleep quality at night. So you have to decide if naps are a good idea for you or if they're helpful for you or not. Action steps. Follow these napping tips to improve the quality of your sleep. So make them short 10 to 26 minutes, make them early in the day, make sure they're not impacting your sleep, and make sure they help you. So use them if they help you. Avoid them if they don't. Add this to your sleep journal. On days that you nap, do you feel better? On days that you nap, do you sleep worse that night? These are all things you need to know to determine where naps should fit in your life. All right, I hope this helped. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.