Here’s How Napping Boosts Your Overall Health
Napping tends to get the side-eye in our society, but as big corporations like Google and Nike embrace dedicated napping rooms for their employees, the word is getting out about the benefits of some mid-day shut-eye and attitudes are slowly shifting. The research backs it up too — naps can help improve memory, mood, reaction time, and a host of other areas, as long as they’re not interfering with nighttime sleep and aren’t the cause of sleep inertia, also known as grogginess. Read on to see how incorporating a nap can make you feel better from the inside out.
Napping boosts your immune system.
The National Sleep Foundation recommends a daily 20-minute nap to fend off illness, particularly during flu season, because it can reverse the effects of sleep deprivation and decrease stress, which both can negatively impact your immunity. In a study led by sleep researcher Brian Faraut, a group of men was invited to participate in a series of sleep tests that would determine if naps impacted health. The study found that the men who were allowed to take a nap after being sleep deprived the night before had lower levels of a substance called norepinephrine, which is excreted by the body when under stress, compared to men who weren’t allowed to nap. According to a Reuters article on the study: “Lack of sleep also affected an immune-regulating molecule called interleukin-6, which dropped when the men were sleep-deprived but stayed normal when they were allowed to nap.”
Napping can improve memory.
In a 2008 study published in Behavioral Brain Research, researcher Sara Mednick found that naps improve perceptual learning, which is using your five senses to gain information from your surroundings. She noted that while caffeine is responsible for increasing your alertness and attention span, a 60-90 minute nap can do this plus have the added benefit of better memory consolidation. In another study, which was aimed at older Americans and published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, research showed that “people who napped for 30 to 90 minutes had better word recall — which is a sign of good memory — than people who did not nap or who napped for longer than 90 minutes.”
Napping lowers your blood pressure.
While the above benefits of napping may not surprise you, knowing that napping could do as much as lowering your blood pressure is definitely not as well-known. In research presented at a 2019 conference for the American College of Cardiology, mid-day naps were found to reduce blood pressure as much as making certain lifestyle changes like reducing salt and alcohol in your diet, or in some cases, taking blood pressure medication.
Need a bit of help getting into a sleepy state of mind? Try our Better Sleep playlist on Alo Moves — full of relaxing meditation, yoga nidra, and sound baths.