When I found out in 2022 that I have a form of adult-onset muscular dystrophy, every doctor I spoke to asked the same question: Do you ever get really tired during the day? Yes, actually. I often find that I need to sleep a bit during the day just to make it past dinner. As I found out, the reason is due to hypersomnolence, a symptom that accompanies my disease. Suddenly I had an explanation for why I commonly felt the urge to nap.
Having some rare disease, of course, isn’t a prerequisite for wanting (or needing) to fall asleep during normal working hours. Being physically exhausted comes along with life’s drudgeries. Yet what I was experiencing, and continue to experience, made me wonder what the rules were for napping. How long should a nap be? Where should that nap take place? Is there a certain time during the day that’s optimal for napping? And then there’s perhaps the biggest question of all, which has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with culture: Only unemployed losers take naps, right?
“When I first started doing nap research in the early 2000s, naps were totally looked down upon. It was considered lazy,” says Sara Mednick, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life. “Actually, naps are just as powerful as a night of sleep for memory and motor-learning and emotional processing.”
To say nothing of the fact that if you are sleep-deprived, naps are a good countermeasure in the never-ending war against fatigue. So take a nap. But there are several things to consider beforehand. —Andrew Zaleski
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