The power nap route to fame and riches
Or, how to stay awake in the afternoon at least
I’m an early riser by nature. At least I have been in the last ten years. This may partly be down to age. I also enjoy the satisfaction of getting a few hours in before the house stirs. This has become less important as the children grow and leave home but the habit has stuck.
One of the drawbacks of the early start, however, is the signs of fatigue creeping in early afternoon. But the solution is simple enough: the power nap.
I don’t remember where I first came across the idea of the power nap — it’s certainly not one of my own — but it felt right as soon as I discovered it. The secret is in the length of the nap. Too short and nothing is achieved; too long and you wake feeling worse than before.
In the past, when I had been tired, I had tended to go to bed and sleep for an hour or so. On waking, I wondered why I felt so bad. It was like lunchtime drinking; the afternoon was a right-off.
So the secret to the power nap — to gain the power rather than suffer the lethargy — is to limit the time: I set my timer to 20 minutes. This is enough to send you into a light refreshing sleep without getting into the deeper sleep that causes so many problems when you abort it prematurely. (There are scientific terms for those different sleep types and scientific reasons for the effects but you’ll have to look them up yourself — or just trust me on this.)
It sounds like such a short time and I still lie down on the sofa and think I’ll never get to sleep in 20 minutes, never mind grab any useful rest. Then the alarm goes and I realise I have been asleep for most of the time. I think this has a lot to do with habit; the training of the body/mind to accept that now is the time to sleep.
Another trick I use to ensure that I bounce awake with renewed vigour — and I may be exaggerating a little there — is to drink coffee before I lie down. The caffeine buzz hits my body just as I am waking, so I get a double dose of pep goodness; half from the sleep and half from the coffee. Call me unstoppable.
This all works well when I’m working from home. When I have to go to London for the day I always notice the effect of the lack of my potency snooze. No matter how riveting the book or the magazine article I try to read on the train home, I’m usually making nodding dog impressions by the time I’m half way. And when I wake up at my station, I feel curiously unrefreshed.
That experience of fatigue and the fact that an uncontrolled doze does nothing to alleviate the symptoms underscores the positive effects of the power nap on a normal day.
So I keep napping. 20 minutes at a time. Once a day. (Any more would obviously be not only greedy but undermine the whole experiment.)
