Home ›› 31 Mar 2023 ›› Opinion
Keep this to yourself but I am, quite literally, sleeping on the job. I’m sitting on my desk chair and should be writing this article that you’re reading, but my eyes are closed and my forearms are relaxed on the arm rests, palms facing up. There’s an apple in my left hand (I’ll explain why in a second).
It’s a peculiar scene, I’ll grant you, but not one of abject laziness, whatever my wife tells you. I’m napping in the name of science, art and productivity. Some of history’s greatest thinkers swore by the idea of a power nap, and scientific literature is beginning to suggest they were right to.
In recent years, researchers have found that a short doze can improve everything from memory and creativity to cardiovascular health and immune function. Napping is a superpower, it would seem, capable of restoring body and mind. Some have even described it as a public health intervention waiting to happen – not least because we’re all so very tired.
As we know, adults need seven to nine hours of sleep a night. And as we also know, we’re not getting it. Screen time, stress, caffeine habits and shift work are all to blame, but according to a YouGov poll earlier this year, one in eight Brits gets less than six hours of shuteye a night and a quarter of us use sleeping pills. Plus, if you believe marketing surveys from mattress companies, we build up more than 30 hours of sleep debt a month.
In turn, the British economy loses £30bn a year because of sleep loss. More importantly, chronic sleep disorders can increase a person’s risk of high blood pressure and heart problems, as well as immune system dysfunction and obesity. No wonder sleep has become an obsession, something we track, hack and optimise.
Which brings me back to my desk chair experiment, and that apple I’m holding. Here’s the theory, posited by Thomas Edison no less and tested recently by researchers at the Paris Brain Institute: micro naps have the power to energise your mind, improve your alertness and supercharge your creativity – but it’s got to be quick, otherwise you slip into the wrong phase of sleep and wake up groggy instead.
It takes a while but I eventually begin to doze off, apple in hand, thoughts and images dancing about my subconscious. Then as the lights go out and I fully lose consciousness, the apple falls from my hand, waking me up with a jolt. It’s a weird feeling, but it works, I think. I soon feel more alert than I did before the nap and more lucid; the words come a little more freely. Mostly the same things that happen when you sleep at night, just in a single cycle (usually) and over a shorter period of time. First you doze in that hinterland between wakefulness and sleep, which usually lasts around five minutes. Then, as you lose consciousness, you enter stage 2 sleep where your breathing slows, your muscles relax and your core body temperature falls. Brain activity slows down, too.
“Stage 2 sleep is really great for alertness and that pushing-the-reset-button kind of power nap,” says Prof Sara Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Irvine.
Some 10 to 25 minutes later, deep sleep (stage 3) begins, characterised by a particular type of brain activity called delta waves. Researchers believe this stage of sleep, which can last up to 40 minutes, is vital recovery time for the body: a biological restoration during which your immune system and other bodily systems get a kind of MOT, and your memories are consolidated.
Lastly there is stage 4 or REM sleep. At this point, you’re 60 to 90 minutes into your siesta. This is the point when dreams will be most vivid and your body will enter a sort of paralysis with muscles freezing up. The exception is your eyes, which move quickly beneath the eyelids.
Science Focus
