The next time your boss takes you to task for napping on the job, tell him or her you are just trying to improve your job performance. It’s official, taking an afternoon nap is good for you and may even make you brainier.

You don’t even need to sleep for long, just a few minutes will work wonders for your memory, focus and concentration. It seems that the mere act of nodding off is what counts rather than the duration of the nap.
A new study by German researchers and published in the medical journal New Scientist will be music to the ears of office workers – who have always sung the praise of power napping anyway.

Also, previous studies have shown that the brain is more active in people who nap than in those who do not sleep during the day. 

But don’t take the news as an excuse to sleep away the entire afternoon; naps are only beneficial when they do not last longer than 20 minutes. A study from Harvard Medical School of nearly 24,000 people found that those who regularly took afternoon naps were nearly 40 percent less likely to die from heart disease than non-nappers. 

It has long been thought that humans need long periods of uninterrupted sleep – refreshing stage four deep sleep to feel truly refreshed – but now it seems that much of sleep’s functional aspects are accomplished at its very beginning. Sleep experts are playing with the idea that memory processing may be triggered at the onset of sleep – while the deeper sleep we slip into at night may be important for core functions. Only then is it crucial that you sleep uninterrupted.

So the next time you feel like nodding off in the office, on a train journey, or after the lunchtime news, just tell yourself and your boss if you have one that you are doing it to improve your afternoon performance. Now you have the evidence to prove it!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 4:20 am and is filed under In the News, Sleep. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.