There’s also the time required, with the researchers establishing that the amount of time you spend sleeping is critical to the amount of mind-hacking productivity you’ll reap.As it turns out, it’s a balancing act: sleep too little and you’ll likely only feel worse than you did before – sleep too much and you’ll emerge from your nap with crusty eyes in a dreaded zombie-like state.
The most productive length for a nap seemed to be between 30 and 90 minutes, with an hour-long snooze being the sweet spot for refreshing your brain.To discover this, the researchers examined the nap habits of almost 3000 elderly Chinese people, and then immediately gave them a series of mental tasks to assess how fresh – or how drowsy – the nap left them feeling.
One of the tasks asked the participants to memorize a series of words before the nap, and then recall them straight after, and another was to copy drawings of simple geometric figures.(Which more or less sounds like the worst thing in the world – imagine awaking from a nap to find people in lab coats are pressuring you to draw a rhombus or a heptagram.)The results revealed a win for the nappers: those who took a moderate hour-long nap actually performed better on all mental tasks than those who slept longer, and those who didn’t nap at all.
“Older adults who did not nap or napped longer than 90 minutes (extended nappers) were significantly more likely than those who napped for 30 to 90 minutes after lunch (moderate nappers) to have lower overall cognition scores,” wrote the researchers.”This study suggests that absence of napping and too much napping are associated with poorer cognition, but naps of a moderate duration are associated with better cognition and may be an important part of optimizing cognition.”
At this point, the researchers are unsure why napping is so good for boosting your productivity, but most experts agree it’s a way for your brain to get a mini-recharge in, not unlike a massage for your body.”When we go to sleep as adults, we go into light sleep for about 20 to 25 minutes then we go into deep sleep,” sleep expert Dr Carmel Harrington told Coach in November.
“You want to make sure you stay in light sleep because if you go into deep sleep you wake up disoriented and end up with sleep inertia, and it can take hours to go away.”Plus it can affect your night-time sleep.”
SOURCE…coach.nine.com