The Sleep-Easy Guide to Surprisingly Effective Napping
An impromptu snooze is a superpower, and the same methods can get you drifting off at night, fast.
This one’s a gamechanger.
Productivity, alertness, memory, mood, vigilance and health — all improved by taking 25 minutes out of your day for a quick snooze.
Let’s look at the whys, whens and hows of the perfect power nap, and how those methods can help you sleep at night, too.
Why so short?
A short nap can turn your day around.
Sleeping for longer than 30 minutes will likely leave you feeling groggy and take a long time to start feeling yourself again due to sleep inertia, removing all the productivity and mood benefits of a nap. It can also affect your sleep pattern that night.
So a 10–20 minute power nap is the ideal way to boost your day and bring you back to full strength. This length of time is also the approved length of power nap by NASA, who along with Google, pencil a nap into their workday schedules.
On top of mood, alertness and productivity boosts, short naps have other health benefits such as a reduced risk of heart attacks and strokes.
