Pretty sick of hearing from science exactly how long a nap should be. Are you coming over to nudge me out of this bed at exactly 4:47 before I cascade into a REM whirlpool, my friends? Because if not kindly do not come crowding around at me with this “twenty minute” business, as that is no good to me at all.
Look at this graph. I see this graph everywhere. I don’t know where it came from, I found it on “secrets of the fed dot com,” which I think is probably not its original source:
I’m sick three-quarters-and-a-half-to-death of these nap studies telling me how long I can sleep in the afternoon for. “Only sleep for six minutes after a half a cup of coffee between 2:22 and 2:38 for optimal nap results, any longer could result in Bad Vibes,” well guess what, science, the only nap results I am looking for is BEING ASLEEP, I am curled up on my mom’s most cat-hair-beribboned couch because it is SOFT and my brain is HURTING FROM CONSCIOUSNESS, not because I’m looking for Increased Memoralling Productiviting In The Workspace, my chums. I’ve never napped for shorter than two hours a day in my life, and I refuse to take a present participle of blame for that fact. “Don’t fall asleep after five, as this could decrease optimal results…” WHAT IF AFTER FIVE IS WHEN I GOT TIRED, NAP DOCTORS? WHAT IF “AFTER FIVE” IS THE SLEEPIEST I’M AT AND A NAP WOULD CURE THAT SLEEPINESS UP RIGHT QUICK?
James Maas, former chairman of the Department of Psychology at Cornell University who is widely credited with coining the term “power nap,” says people should choose between 20 and 90 minutes for a power nap, should set an alarm, only nap if they haven’t had adequate sleep (7.5 hours or more), sleep in a space heated at 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and rest laying down.
Okay, JAMES, I won’t sleep doing cartwheels in my Volcano Room or whatnot, but a lot of these circumstances are right outside of my wheelhousery of controllment, do you know what I mean? Here’s my issue, James my man:
“Oh, just lay down in a dark room, and somehow relax your entire brain and body in the middle of your average day, just do that somehow, and then once you’re calm and safe enough to actually fall asleep, just remember to only do that for thirty minutes.” I don’t know about you, Jimbles, but I don’t have a lot of control over what my body does once I go to sleep, I pretty much hand things off to the night shift and hope for the best, so I can say “okay, team, we’re just gonna do this for a thirty-hour, right?” but my team is just a bunch of rowdy kids who know they’re getting left with a substitute teacher who actually doesn’t even have the authority to tell Ms. Kane when she gets back what they’ve been up to so why are they even gonna listen to me? How long a nap is gonna get, nap-wise, is not up to me. I’m handing off the wheel once I fall a-napping, my dudes, and there’s not anything I or anyone else can do about my brain-state once it’s in the Vale of Shadows.
It takes one a while to fall asleep of a night, yes? You lie around a bit, thinking about things you’ve done or you might do, and your brain sort of circles around in your skull like a dog, checking things out before it curls up for the night, and sometimes your brain does a quick little self-scan of like hey we asleep yet team? and then you get a little extra bolt of alertness cos you have to tell your brain nah friend not just yet, gettin’ there though, check back in later, and that can sometimes add ten to fifteen minutes of the Transitioning To No More Awake Eyes process. Which is no big deal when you have a big chunk of the clock carved out for lying motionless in bed ahead of you, but when you only give yourself twenty to thirty minutes to sleep in the first place, my patriot of com, you’re setting yourself up for a nice batch of Not Ever Falling Asleep At All But Instead A Half Hour Of Lying Down At A Real Specific Temperature Wondering If I’m Asleep Yet Oh No Time’s Up.
It’s literally impossible for a human being to control or predict with any regularity how long a nap is going to last, and I refuse to brook argument on this matter, I will not be brooking any of that in future, so how about we just agree that when I’m asleep, I’m asleep, and let the chips pitch about collapsement-style where they may. Nap science, you’re always offering me directives and warnings but you’re not giving me solutions, so unless you’re coming over to my house with a nap belt that’s going to stop time while I’m de-conked, I highly suggest you go back to finding me a diet soda that’s not going to kill me, because my blood’s got too much of that bad kind of sugar in it already.
It’s really, really difficult for me to nap. Or fall asleep. Or fall back asleep after waking up at 3am because I was hot and had to adjust my blankets and now I’m cold and SCREW YOU EVERYTHING JUST LET ME SLEEP OH GOD WHY
It must be really awesome to be able to fall asleep within moments of laying down. If you’re one of those people, I hate you. A lot. Sorry.
I’m married to one of those people who can lie down and just…sleep. Don’t be sorry. He doesn’t care because he’s probably asleep.
Me too. It used to be maddening – lights off, he turns onto his left side, and it’s like someone pressed his off button. There he goes! Asleep! What a bastard. But now I am more chill about it. You sleep. I’ll just you know, let my brain use itself for an extra 45 minutes. I am optimistic that eventually that extra involuntary brain time will yield results for me.
Me three! My wife passes out the second her head hit the pillow. Whereas it takes me forever sometimes to fall asleep (thoughts circling like a dog is exactly right).
My bf is one of those people and it boggles my mind. Also he can sleep anywhere! I don’ understand this either and overall I’m always mad at him cause it’s so easy for him to fall asleep.
My ex combined instant sleeping with loud snoring. I spent a lot of nights on the couch.
Hiya! Sleeping is my superpower.
And I like the feeling of falling asleep so much, sometimes I set an alarm for the middle of the night, just so I’ll get to fall back asleep.
*soft, hopeless weeping*
Well obviously you don’t have trouble falling asleep, you are a kitten who has just eaten a plate of delicious pasta carbs, this is an EGREGIOUS sleep advantage.
Bow before me, for I am Spaghetti Cat!
I often do that on my days off. Wake up at 5:30, contemplate my lack of schedule, slip back into the comforting arms of Morpheus.
I am one of those people and my gf is most definitely not. I can sleep almost anywhere too.
I fall asleep pretty quickly (at least the first time or two) now that I’ve had a baby for a year and never in all that time slept more than four or five hours in a row, and rarely more than six in a 24-hour period. Still can’t nap for shit though. Once every month or so I will manage to drift off in the afternoon, and then my husband will clomp in and start talking and not notice that I am not responding or looking at him and keep talking and being really excited about something and then I will try to kill him with my mind but it won’t work because my mind is too exhausted to form death rays.
My mother is one of those people, and I’m always like “what is this witchcraft, and why have you not shared it with me?”
I hate naps in the afternoon, like serious naps. I always wake up in total confusion: “what time is it, what day is it, do I have to get dressed for work, who am I?”
Ooh, yes, my brain is very consistent on the link between waking up and time for work. I despise it, almost as much as I despise any phone ringtone that reminds me of work calling me for an extra shift.
I’m like you, and also an insanely light sleeper and my stupid boyfriend is one of those people you hate a lot and he also likes the goddamn snooze button until I tell him I will throw his phone out the window if he presses it one more time. He’ll fall back asleep half a second after pressing it and I’ll just be up in an adrenaline-fueled rage forever.
I am the same. I have chronic insomnia and have had it since I was a kid. My mom also has weird sleep patterns (we’re both night people). I have been very annoyed lately because I’m thinking of getting pregnant and I take sleeping pills, and no doctor will take my insomnia seriously–they just say, well, just take benedryl! Or melatonin! My insomnia laughs in the face of those silly things. They don’t seem to understand the pain that is literally not sleeping for over 24 hours and still not being able to sleep.
Sorry for the rant, but it’s been bothering me for…ever.
(I reaaaally hate to be this person so please know that I’m not trying to be That Person!) I’ve also had chronic insomnia since I was little and I have the “days without sleep” problem as well. For several years I took trazodone regularly but I had to stop. I tried Benadryl one day (for allergies) and it completely knocked me out. Since then I’ve taken it every night and it’s really good. I’m sure it’s not for everyone (my friend told me to take melatonin because it knocks her out immediately but it did absolutely nothing for me) so if you have tried it, please disregard this message. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it!! Especially if you’re a NyQuil fan. Ugh I’m so sorry, I still feel like this is coming off the wrong way!
tl;dr: it SUCKS when people don’t take insomnia seriously because it’s a beast and it can ruin your life. But Benadryl can actually be really awesome so if you haven’t tried it, you might like it!
I’m a Bad Sleeper too but when I got pregnant, I could sleep for twelve hours at a stretch like a totally normal human. I did take Benadryl late in the pregnancy because it helped but was able to get through the pregnancy without taking my beloved sleeping pills that had the unfortunate side effect of making babies grow extra limbs. Anyway, maybe you’ll get lucky. All the hormones with pregnancy and breastfeeding helped my sleep a lot but I’m probably not normal.
My tip for falling asleep quickly is to develop hypothyroidism. My mom has it and falls asleep the minute her head hits the pillow. I used to take a while to fall asleep but then my thyroid got lazy and now it’s lights out.
Can I just… add some extra thyroids, or something? Hmm…
I am with you on the hate corner. I have slept through three nights since 2008.
The funny thing is, it is hard for me to fall asleep at night (I am a night person) but I can nap really easily, and sleep even just sitting up on the bus or whatever. Not that that is always ideal.
I fell asleep standing up in the shower once. I’d been leaning against the wall, thinking how warm the water was and how nice it would feel when I went to bed, and the next thing I knew I was spluttering awake with water coming out my nose.
Too bad I’ve had horrendous insomnia for the last four years.
I am one of those people usually, but I went through several years of horrible depression-related inability to sleep LIKE AT ALL, so I feel like I have earned it.
I spend half my week at my house, and half my week at the boyfriends.
My bedtime routine/sleep habits are noticeably different in these two locations, and the sleep I get as a result is also noticeably different.
The bed at my place is much less comfortable, for starters, but it is also the only piece of furniture I use (I rent a room in a shared house) for everything. His bed is insanely comfortable and the only things I do in that bed are sleep, read and shenanagins. No watching TV, no working, no backlit screens of any kind, as a matter of fact.
At my place, I am much more likely to toss and turn; at his I snuggle up with my kindle and am usually asleep by the time I’ve gotten through 2 pages.
I have never fallen asleep in less than an hour and that’s on the good nights. I once was up for over three days and had a minor hallucination. So I hate those people too, though not as much as the ones who preach ‘early to bed, early to rise’ at you.
Ugh, those people who equate early rising with moral worth can just fuck right off. Individual circadian rhythms are not moral choices!
I did not develop the skill of falling asleep instantaneously until I took a job that required constantly changing early morning/overnight shifts. I no longer have the job, but I do fall asleep (and stay asleep, but I’ve always had that skill) very quickly, sometimes in the middle of conversations with my fiancé.
On the other hand, I can’t nap for shit, and he can. (Unless I am in a car, in which case, zzzzzzzzz. This, also, has been true since childhood.)
One of my good friends studies sleep (not napping, a different stage of sleep), and she went to a new eye doctor recently. He asked her what she did and when she told him, he then spent an hour mansplaining sleep to her. The sleep researcher.
tl;dr don’t discuss anything with men, even sleep.
oh jesus fucking christ.
set him on fire
Like an ant. There should be more than enough lenses around.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
sounds like a medically ideal time to take a nap
don’t talk to men
other people exist and many of them are men: Furious Forever
dude, I hate it when guys mansplain the ancient Greeks or something to me.
GET A PHD IN IT, GUYS. Then come talk to me.
I study prisons and juvenile detention and this happens basically anytime a dude asks me about my research.
TRUST, YO, I KNOW MORE. IT’S LITERALLY MY JOB TO KNOW MORE.
I have even had men try to mansplain ROMANCE NOVELS to me when they find out I write them.
…dude. No. Just…no.
That… does not sound like it would end well.
THIS IS EXACTLY MY PROBLEM WITH NAPS. I mean, I do sometimes feel like lying down in a dark room for twenty minutes is still helpful when I’m really tired, but this whole power nap business is just so much nonsense.
I can only nap accidentally (cars are the best, if a car ride is over 15 minutes and I’m not driving I will probably be fighting sleep). If I ever lay down and try to take a nap on purpose I will just lie there like a damn fool. I got in a lot of trouble for this in preschool.
Car naps are the best/easiest naps.
I have never had trouble falling asleep at night, but I can’t purposefully take a nap. I only do it when I’m exhausted.
Those preschool naps were also hard for me. You got in trouble even if you were very quietly rearranging furniture in the big dollhouse and not disturbing anyone else. I’d look resentfully over at the class’s champion napper and think, “he’s faking it.” No one can fall asleep in one minute. Especially not a four-year-old child in the middle of the afternoon while laying on a thin blanket in a room full of interesting things. The teacher gave out a prize to the kid who was the best napper, which provided an incentive to be a big ol’ faker.
“The teacher gave out a prize to the kid who was the best napper”
This is why I could never be a college professor, because I’d be trying that out on them, too. “Let’s see who can sleep the longest! Okay, just keep it down and don’t bother me!”
Oh, college students sleep in my class just fine without incentive.
I would also like to propose a toast to train naps (Amtrak trains, not subway trains).
I was also a terrible napper in preschool. Even as a wee bb I resented the time I would never get back just lying on a thin blue mat and staring at the ceiling.
I was also a non-napper in preschool- they had to stick me behind things so I wouldn’t bother the other kids.
The only time I *ever* took naps in my entire life was during my first year of law school, which was so miserable I think I was just desperate for sweet oblivion.
Car naps are the best. Downside: sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m driving and cannot be lulled to sleep. It happens more often than I’m proud of.
I fall asleep like a champ when it’s time do be doing other things, like working. Sometimes I spend all day fighting it. But at night when it is actual bedtime, I stay awake like a champ. [sad trombone]
This is me. I function best in the middle of the night.
I am complete shit at napping and always have been. The only time I ever nap is when I’m so exhausted I can barely move, so I’ll get home from work and figure I’ll just need an hour or two… and then I wake up five hours later and it’s the middle of the night.
Related: does anyone know the proper etiquette for sleeping in your car over your lunch break? Should I put up a do not disturb sign in the rear windshield? Cover my face? What if someone knocks on the window, is that fair game to punch them?
Definitely punch them. So long as you do not generally nap in a pool of fake blood or something, or turn a disturbing shade of purple while you nap, why would anyone be knocking on your window?? Presumably you are an adult human who could get right out of the car if you felt like it, not a puppy or a baby or some other thing which would warrant rescuing…
eta: If you find people interfering with you, for sure put up a NAPPING GO AWAY sign. But I don’t think politeness requires you to do so…
Hold an “I aten’t dead” sign.
One of my friends did fall asleep in her car on her lunch break and was rudely awakened by emergency services, who were surprised she was not the dead body in a car someone had apparently reported. So…that sign might be helpful, actually.
I mean, it’s important to be a responsible citizen and report possible dead bodies.
I have this incredibly strong embarrassment-memory of playing on some restaurant’s indoor playground, and play-acting falling from the monkeybars and lying unconscious, because, childhood. When I opened my eyes (felt like hours of pretend-unconsciousness, can’t have been more than a minute or so) there was another boy I had been playing with standing over me with an adult (waiter? parent?) and looking very concerned.
I leapt up and ran back to our table burning with shame and never spoke of it again.
This is pretty tangential, I guess, specially since napping is not pretending to be unconscious, but this just reminded me of that, so there you go.
I am fortunate in that I work in a seedy part of my specific town, and have an abandoned liquor store parking lot available to me for uninterrupted lunch hour naps. This happens at least once a week. Not sure if abandoned liquor stores are available to you, but I suggest seeking them out.
Now lets all stop and think how bad this particular part of town must be that the liquor store can’t even make a go of it.
Um… I hope you are safe?
Maybe use one of those eye masks like you get on airplanes? Then it’ll look like a very deliberate nap.
it never occurred to me that i may be freaking out coworkers by sleeping in my car. noone’s ever bothered me, though. i would lay my seat back all the way and put my sunscreen in the windshield. i dunno if anyone ever even noticed me.
(now i work somewhere with a nap room and it is probably the top reason they will have to kill me to get me to ever leave this job.)
NAP ROOM?? Wow. I just cried a little at how beautiful that thought was, I am super envious.
i am sometimes struck suddenly with a sleepiness so profound that it nearly causes a panic attack. now i can excuse myself for my break/lunch and go lie down for 15 – 30 minutes. it has greatly improved my quality of life.
Who are these people who can sleep without working at it for an hour, and is it legal to kill them?
I did not sleep at all for the first week after I was born, and I permanently lost the ability to nap at four months old. This is probably why I am an only child.
Oh my god your poor parents.
Pretty much the same here – I did sleep after birth, but never for more than 2 hours at a time and rarely more than 6 hours in a 24 hour span. Also lost the ability to nap around 4-6 months old. Bafflingly, my parents had ANOTHER child. Who sleeps fine, so fuck him.
I try not to take naps unless I’m already feeling terrible, because I don’t think I’ve ever woken up from a nap without feeling like I’m trying to catch a 5 am flight. The only thing I can do is try to reboot my day – brush my teeth, take a shower, drink coffee, etc. like it’s actually early in the morning. This usually fails and I just slug around until actual bedtime.
Ditto. Waking up is such an awful process that I’d rather limit it to once a day.
The time I need naps most is in the dead of winter, but unfortunately, the dead of winter is when the sun goes away mid-afternoon (a.k.a. naptime) and if I fall asleep when the sun is up and wake up when it’s dark, I get all sorts of disoriented and queasy. You curl up in a nice, late-afternoon sunbeam and next thing you know it’s freezing and pitch-black and you want to puke.
So yeah… I don’t nap…
I once accidentally napped in the middle of winter and had this happen. I did not wake up wanting to puke though, just totally disoriented. It took me several minutes to piece together what had happened and calm down enough to realize that no I was not actually late for anything or had missed handing in a paper.
Waking up in darkness is so unpleasant! I’m bad at napping anyhow, but I refuse to fall asleep if I know I won’t wake up until after sunset. It makes the rest of the night hellish.
Ugh, that’s the worst. I am very pleased now that it is daylight savings time and I can nap later in the day.
There’s definitely a continuum of naps, though. The very best nap, in my opinion, is the Everyone Else In The Family Is At Work or School So I’ll Just Go Into Work A Little Late nap. Followed by the I Drank All The Booze Last Night So I’m Just Going To Take Ibuprofen And Pepto And Remove My Bra And Lie Down nap. The worst nap is the Sitting Up At Your Desk But Facing Away From the Door So No One Can Tell nap.
There is also the I Am Alone in the South-Facing Den It Is Saturday and I Have Nothing On My Schedule nap, which is glorious.
I used to not be able to nap without feeling like I had been hit with a tranquilizer dart afterwards. So glad that’s not the case anymore.
I once fell asleep against the speaker-box in a nightclub…lulled by the bass reverb.
If I set an alarm when going for a nap, I promise you I would not be able to sleep and would lie there furious until the alarm went off.
My friends laugh at me because I will “go for a nap”, and then appear online at 4am sheepishly apologizing for having over-napped.
My body does not grok “nap”, but it doesn’t worry me because sleep is probably my greatest luxury.
I had a dream recently where there was no duration of time anymore, all was simultaneous, like how the TARDIS sees it, but I was looking at my alarm clock and wondering how the hell to figure out when I was going to have to wake up if everywhen had become now.
Yes, in that case clocks wouldn’t make sense anymore or be needed, but I still needed to sleep and for only a certain duration, so alarm clocks were somehow still necessary, if only to torment.
I don’t have good dreams.
I don’t sleep, I dream.
And with strange aeons even death may die.
“—and by Strange he means bloody peculiar—”
“Exactly. We are not talking your normal Aeons here at all.”
I enjoy Monster a lot more than Automatic For The People.
Yeah I agree, I want an alarm that can somehow figure out when I’m asleep, and then wake me up exactly [x] number of minutes from that point.
It seems like, given FitBits and health apps that track your sleep patterns and shit, this should be possible.
I had an Up 24 (which broke, grr, so I don’t recommend it for that reason) and it kinda did that! It had a power nap mode, and you could also set an alarm within a certain window (so, if you needed to be up by 7, you could say “wake me up by 7 but up to a half hour earlier) and it would wake you up when your sleep cycle was the lightest. And it doesn’t make noise, just buzzes on your wrist (which is kind of a weird way to wake up). It was pretty cool!
Yeah the sleep cycle app for the phone sort of does this, it measures when you move around so it can tell you are in a lighter sleep to wake you up.
I wonder about Sleep Cycle. Like, it’s very informative and has definitely given me an insight into my sleep patterns and what affects my sleep positively or negatively (Plus the routine of it is quite addictive). But I don’t buy the ‘it wakes you up in your lightest stage’ part. It *has* to wake you up by the end of the time you’ve scheduled for it to wake you up, so if you’re in the deepest slow wave sleep cycle of your life at that point, is it going to hold off playing the wake up music? Of course not, because then you’d miss your alarm, be late for work, sue Sleep Cycle for lost earnings etc etc.
Also, I don’t know if it always differentiates between ‘length of time asleep’ and ‘quality of sleep’. If I have an epic 9-10 hour night (bliss!), even if I wake up a lot and am restless, it still registers that as 80% quality or above, and if I have a shorter sleep (between 6 and 8 hours) but feel refreshed on waking, it still says the sleep was >60%.
But then, I guess perfect accuracy is a lot to expect from a free app on your phone. Anyone use the paid Sleep Cycle Nap plug in? I’ve been curious about that a while because regular Sleep Cycle doesn’t account for naps.
I would contribute largely to this kickstarter.
Right? Like a monitor you wear on your finger or something, and then it buzzes X number of minutes after registering your sleeping heart rate.
“If you can feel what I’m feelin’ then it’s a musical masterpiece”
Reading this really stressed me out.
Well done.
Also, there’s a storm coming in. If I was at home, I’d…..actually I probably wouldn’t sleep. I’d get the urge to cook. Dark days are made for pots, both crock and stock.
this is exactly what has always confused me about these recommendations
when sleep comes it is because it has decided it is my master there’s nothing consensual about it and whenever I try to initiate sleep has a headache
maybe I need to get an XBox and have the Kinect monitor me for REMs to start a timer automatically
Salient point.
Also some of us just need to nap for two hours and then sleep five hours at night, okay? Everyone’s bodies are different. Go to something more important, Science.
Setting an alarm for a nap makes me instantly anxious that I won’t be able to fall asleep in the allotted time, thus making sleep impossible.
Ugh, exactly!
Exactly. Or if I was already halfway to sleep, waking up enough to set an alarm is enough to wake me up the whole rest of the way, so I just lie there until the alarm goes off thinking ‘well, damn’.
My best success at timing naps is via the JON method: the jerk-off nap. Somehow, the sweet golden sleep that comes after a solo daytime special lasts between 35-40 glorious minutes every time, no matter my level of tiredness, and returns me to consciousness on a cloud of marshmallow happiness unlike any other waking of my experience. Can highly recommend.
Great plan in theory, except when you’re someone who regularly takes longer to finish the ‘preliminaries’ than the 30-40 minutes you had allotted to actual sleep. *cough* Hypothetically.
I miss naps. I miss them so much. For the last few years, any time I try to sleep that is not when I “have a big chunk of the clock carved out for lying motionless in bed,” I end up having weird night terrors and waking up screaming or crying. It’s a terrible curse, and probably something I should get checked out. But mostly, I just want to nap.
Also, I had a weird dorm-mate in college who would take 11-minute naps in the middle of the evening. We’d all be hanging out, and he’d go, “Sorry, guys. 11-minute nap time! Gotta go!” and he’d just cross the hall, climb up into his lofted bed, and drop dead asleep for 11 minutes. Door open, lights on, people making all kinds of ruckus, and he would just fall asleep. What a (lucky) prick.
I understand this curse so well, because when I nap I get sleep paralysis combined with adrenaline rushes. So I sort of semi-wake up but can’t really wake up or open my eyes no matter how hard I try, and then this wave of crushing prickles, like a head-rush but all over, goes whooshing through my body and paralyzes me so that I can’t move or breathe. And I just have to lie and wait for it to pass, and then a minute later there it goes again, and this might happen five times in a row before the sleep paralysis finally lets me go. I have more or less stopped napping as a result.
I once watched my dad fall asleep while leaning against a wall, standing up. We were at my school for an event, and he just leaned and dozed off, his head occasionally nodding ever so slightly. He never fell down. He didn’t even snore, which I didn’t think was possible. I am still in awe of that feat, approximately 25 years later.
DADS
I have a brother-in-law who’s never been diagnosed with narcolepsy, but all signs say yes. He once fell asleep while stopped at a stoplight, and was so deep in sleep he actually started to dream before the honks behind him woke him up.
I have a colleague who can sleep with her eyes open. I saw her do it once at a conference – we were sitting together in the front row, and all of a sudden she stopped fidgeting and looked very attentive through all the speakers, and then at the end of the last talk she gave a little jerk and a sharp inhale and smiled at me.
She says it’s something that can’t be taught, but I think she’s just withholding her magic knowledge of nap-method from me.
ugh my dad does this, mostly sitting down though. We go over for dinner (or invite them) and after a certain time, which seems to be about 9pm, he just goes, nope, and falls asleep where he’s sitting. he’s still kind of sentient, like, he hears when we’re laughing at him, but mostly he’s just there in a daze of sleepiness, sitting up straight on the couch.
classic dad.
this is the most important thing you’ve ever written
I can’t do the 20 minute power nap. I’m an insomniac, so I need some lead time to convince my body to sleep. When I was in my mid-20s, a doctor sent me to a sleep clinic because she decided I had sleep apnea rather than insomnia. It was in an old, spooky hospital. The room was too hot and the light was weird, even with the lights off and the noises were weird and I didn’t sleep. At all. And that’s what the clinic told me. “The study didn’t work because you didn’t sleep.” And that was that.
WHY AREN’T YOU RELAXED?
i’m no “scientist” but not being able to fall asleep *IS* insomnia, right?
Well then, that explains that! Thank you for visiting our clinic.
A large portion of my ability/inability to fall asleep is controlled by a cat.
Yes. And the cat that controls my sleep schedule is an asshole.
Isn’t that redundant?
I can’t nap either, although maybe I can now due to my newest life changing discovery… I couldn’t fall asleep at night very either, and then my therapist got me amber wraparound glasses, they fit over my regular glasses and if I read for around 45 minutes before bed wearing them with no overhead light, I’m out in 15 minutes.
I am intrigued! So bedside lamps are okay? Are you able to read off electronic screens or is it supposed to be paper?
I think it’s ok to read screens with the glasses, but I haven’t retained that info because it’s not my habit. I’ve known about blue light from screens for some time, and am a big book (paper) person (I have nothing really against e-books and I have an e-reader, but I’m in my late 30’s so my reading habit was entrenched with paper books. My e-reader is handy for travelling but it just doesn’t *feel* right for my quotidian habit.) Back when this was a thing I found out, there wasn’t even smart phones, and I was already just in the habit of reading a hard copy novel before bed.
So just recently my therapist told me that even a reading lamp emits enough to affect sleep (if you’re, like me, not an easy sleeper) and she emailed me links to the studies (she’s sciencey, not wooey, which I like) and I looked up some stuff on my own, and yep! The amber glasses wrap around the sides, so the lamp beside my couch is fine, as long as it’s not overhead, because there is a gap between the glasses and my forehead.
(Couch because I also don’t read in bed. Apparently if you have issues sleeping you should reserve bed for nothing but sleep so that your body is trained to do one thing and one thing only there. And yes, I mostly have sex in my living room.)
I call all sleeping naps. There’s the daily nap and the nighttime nap. Nighttime nap is usually longer than daytime nap. And it’s at nighttime. That’s the only distinction. I do try to time daytime nap so that I wake up when it’s still light out but if I need to sleep for 4+ hours then whatevs, clearly I needed it.
In my first Graduate program we would often nap under our desks in the cubicle farm, and our fellow students would contribute sweaters etc to the nest pile. We’d leave notes on the desk above us as to when we’d like to be roused, such as “don’t let me miss the 4 pm meeting thanks” or “do let me miss the meeting and tell them I’m sick.”
My current grad program has a sofa in the study lounge that is in high demand for the napping. But I really liked sleeping in a nest of sweaters under my desk.
BRB buying some old sweaters at Goodwill.
SCENE: AFTER THE REVOLUTION COMES
MINISTER IN CHARGE OF SHOOTING PEOPLE INTO THE SUN IN A ROCKET: Sir, please confirm or deny that you are the person who coined the term “power nap.”
JAMES MAAS, FORMER CORNELL UNIVERSITY PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT CHAIRMAN: (LONG, SHIFTY-EYED SILENCE)
Best nap strategy – have lunch. Watch 1 episode of something. Get in the bed. Fall asleep. Wake up however many hours later it takes for your partner to decide it is time to wake you up for dinner.
When I go to take a nap, I get SUPER stressed about setting an alarm on my phone due to studies like these. Ok, 20 minutes is ideal? GREAT!
But what time to do I set my alarm for? I CAN’T KNOW UNLESS I KNOW HOW LONG IT WILL TAKE ME TO FALL ASLEEP. Ok, I assume it’ll take me 15 minutes to really get into the sleep zone, so I’ll set my alarm for 35 minutes from now. BUT WAIT. What if I fall asleep sooner than expected and then I cross the barrier into the not ideal nap zone????
Naps are a strange and vaguely frightening mystery to me. The only times I can nap is if I’m utterly, completely exhausted for some reason–even then it takes me at least half an hour to fall asleep, and I will wake up anywhere from three to five hours later feeling like I’ve been chugging vodka in a washing machine, unsure of my own name or where I’m from.
Sleep is for nighttime, when everything is quite and dark and I’m ensconced in a perfectly wrapped blanket burrito and I know I have a solid eight hours before I’m expected to be conscious.
Last week I lay down at around 4 pm to take a “nap” thinking I was just going to wake up naturally at 6 or 7ish, cook some dinner, watch some TV until bedtime, do normal bedtime stuff like change and brush my teeth, and then go back to sleep.
I actually woke up when my emergency backup alarm went off at 8:30 the next morning – completely disoriented, starving hungry, urgently needing to use the bathroom, dehydrated, fuzzy-mouthed, and wearing wrinkled clothes. And not enough time to fix all of those things before having to get to work.
This is not the first time this has happened to me. Naps don’t work for me and I am sad about it.
I keep doing this sort of thing. I will get up in the morning, have breakfast, feel sleepy, decide to just lie down and rest my eyes for a bit, and then wake up at 3pm. It takes me ages to fall asleep at night, but suddenly my body has decided it wants to sleep all day.
“…before I cascade into a REM whirlpool…”
When I do that, I see Michael Stipe and those other guys rocking out.
Lie down. LIE down. Not lay! It’s intransitive! If he doesn’t know his verb forms, how can we trust him to know his naps? Lie, lay, lain and lay, laid, laid. IT’S NOT NEUROSCIENCE.
Yesterday, for the first time in literally ages, I did not have my regular shots of espresso in the afternoon. I fell asleep at a regular time, like a normal person, within a short period of going to bed. It was AMAZING
i’m narcoleptic. i do not “sleep at night” or “take naps” so much as “strop trying to stay awake for however long i can get away with it”. being awake is fucking *exhausting*.
i am totally useless on road trips but i’m a delight to fly with. just wake me up when we get there.
my partner is a very finicky sleeper and it blows his mind that i sleep anywhere anytime, often seemingly against my own will. my sleeping habits also mean that a simple 10-15 minute nap is a full sleep cycle for me: fall asleep, snore, drool, dream, wake up and go about my day. he’s amazed every time.
anyway, so… i guess i’m the super napper the non sleepers hate. sorrynotsorry zzZZzzzzzZZzzzzz….
I really like this, not just for the promotion of sweet, unstructured napping, but for the challenge to the Efficiency Model of human existence. I know a lot of people find the whole ‘life hacks’ approach useful, but for me it’s depressing how much it’s focused on being a Functional Member of Society who Does Their Job and Never Complains and Is Always Proactive (But Not Too Proactive). It’s like everything you do, from food to sleep to exercise to even your mental attitude to things, has to be be geared towards this maximising-efficiency model. Yeah, unhelpful habits can be bad for you, but the lifehack approach can feel so humourless and prescriptive. Sometimes we just gotta be our frustrated, food-that-tastes-good-eating, irregular-time-napping selves.
Best reply yet. Nobody bothers infants with this B.S. Why can’t science leave us all alone?
Cheers,
Mitch
I do not understand the power nap. It takes me at least 15 minutes to fall asleep, so I should be budgeting a full half hour most of which i’ll just spend awake and annoyed? No thanks.
Just got back from a training and have a headache. I have now been convinced that even though it’s ‘too late in the day’ to curl up and unpowernap.
brb finding someone to invent aforementioned Nap Belt
Just popping in to say I use the “Power Nap” app on my iphone which are the same people that make Sleep Cycle. It monitors your body movement and wakes you up before you enter REM. I’ve used it quite a bit and I’ve found mostly I can avoid that terrible sensation of waking up like a corpse
I don’t have much to add re: naps, but I did want to say that the style of this piece reminds me SO MUCH of Michael Pemulis from Infinite Jest (AKA the best character in the book), and Mallory, if you ever have the urge to write a Pemulis-POV piece, there would be a very enthusiastic audience for that in the form of me.
In unexpected solidarity, I arrived at my destination and napped for a luxurious while. Driving makes me sleep SO hard…
I came home, read this while nodding my head in agreement, then got halfway through the comments before I needed to go take a nap.
I went home from work early with angry guts….and went to sleep. (I didn’t feel like starting a pot of black beans at that point, but the rain had passed anyway and the cozy overcast was gone) (a storm smacked down a big-ass tree a few hours later though) (Anyway I hope everyone got or gets some rest)
In defense of the nap alarm. While few things beat an open ended nap window, when napping under time constraints, an alarm allows me to fall asleep more easily as I am not worrying about failing to wake up in time for whatever. I set the alarm for how much time I can allot the nap process and don’t worry about the actual sleep time. 5 minutes of true sleep beats 50 of half-sleep.
It actually boggles me that Science hasn’t thought of the problem of ‘when to set the alarm for considering it takes us wildly different amounts of time to fall asleep’.
I mean, I’m sure science has and the real problem is neat little infographic-style nap-shamers, but still. It really should be mentioned somewhere down there.
I do not remember ever napping, I am of the above school of toasties that wakes up at any time other than ‘going to work’ time completely disoriented and dopey. But I can almost never stay awake in front of the tv at night, which makes me mad on a deep, visceral level because I spent a large portion of my teen years getting furious at my mother for doing the exact same thing. Like, just watching the news or The Bill or whatever, turn around to say something to her and bam, she’s napping. Why did this make me so mad? Why do I do it now? And most importantly, why don’t I just go to bed when it happens instead of sitting there, pretending I didn’t fall asleep, pretending I won’t just fall asleep again in another two minutes?
Riddle me that, science.
When I nap, it is because I literally cannot be awake for one second longer, and also it always gives me a migraine, but there’s nothing I can do about that, because sleep.
I am one of the blessed Easy Sleepers, capable of falling and staying asleep through all manner of noise and jostling. My brother has an entire photo album of me napping in public places while we backpacked through much of Europe one summer.
The highlight was an overnight ferry trip when we basically had to sleep in an empty ballroom with around 75 others. He said they all bonded over their mutual hatred for me (slumbering blissfully flat on my back while fully clothed) and an elderly Frenchman who snored like a freight train and possessed a body odor that confirmed every cliche Americans have about the French hygienic practices. Apparently we were the only two on board who got any shut eye and my brother recalled saying “That’s my little sister. I know, I hate her too,” multiple times.
If it’s any consolation, I talk in my sleep nearly every night and sleepwalk a few times every year. I Paranormal Activity’d my dad when I was 15- he woke up to find me standing next to the bed *staring* at him. Grounds for justifiable homicide in any court.
11 minutes sounds… oddly specific. Maybe he was trying polyphasic sleep?
(It would explain why he was able to nap in those conditions. People doing polyphasic sleep aim to get something like 3-4 hours of sleep every 24 hours, if I understand correctly, so I assume that whenever they lie down for a nap they crash.)
I'm a Bad Sleeper too but when I got pregnant, I could sleep for twelve hours at a stretch like a totally normal human. I did take Benadryl late in the pregnancy because it helped but was able to get through the pregnancy without taking my beloved sleeping pills that had the unfortunate side effect of making babies grow extra limbs. Anyway, maybe you'll get lucky. All the hormones with pregnancy and breastfeeding helped my sleep a lot but I'm probably not normal.
As a professor, I am all about napping in the office. Just shut the door with a yellow sticky on the door that says, "I'm inside, knock and enter," and then it's lights out!
UNLESS MY TENURE COMMITTEE HAPPENS TO BE READING THIS IN WHICH CASE I WOULD NEVER NAP IN MY OFFICE BECAUSE THAT'S UNPROFESSIONAL AND A DERELICTION OF OF MY OFFICE HOURS
I think it's ok to read screens with the glasses, but I haven't retained that info because it's not my habit. I've known about blue light from screens for some time, and am a big book (paper) person (I have nothing really against e-books and I have an e-reader, but I'm in my late 30's so my reading habit was entrenched with paper books. My e-reader is handy for travelling but it just doesn't *feel* right for my quotidian habit.) Back when this was a thing I found out, there wasn't even smart phones, and I was already just in the habit of reading a hard copy novel before bed.
So just recently my therapist told me that even a reading lamp emits enough to affect sleep (if you're, like me, not an easy sleeper) and she emailed me links to the studies (she's sciencey, not wooey, which I like) and I looked up some stuff on my own, and yep! The amber glasses wrap around the sides, so the lamp beside my couch is fine, as long as it's not overhead, because there is a gap between the glasses and my forehead.
(Couch because I also don't read in bed. Apparently if you have issues sleeping you should reserve bed for nothing but sleep so that your body is trained to do one thing and one thing only there. And yes, I mostly have sex in my living room.)
Naps are my best sleep. The best and most irresistible naps combine late afternoon sun, a cuddly animal or two, snuggly blanket, sofa, and a novel that slips through my fingers as sleep overpowers me.
Yep, Mallory, my patriot of com. YEP.
Yep, Mallory, my patriot of com. YEP.
This is big-time marvellous. I don’t get to nap, tragically, but most of this applies just as nicely to Nighttime Sleep, especially the part about how long it takes to fall asleep and how your brain checks in on the status of that. Hit the dang nail right on the head there, Mallory!
I take a nap sometimes after taking care of my toddler for two hours in the morning so my wife can sleep and going to work and my family treats it like it’s some kind of crime.