[Nfbf-l] Why You Should Take Naps

Thu Sep 27 17:07:14 UTC 2012

I think we should be more tolerant of that kind of napping, but I suspect 
it's going to take a lot to change that in our culture.

Mark Tardif
Nuclear arms will not hold you.
-----Original Message----- 
From: Alan Dicey
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2012 9:02 AM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient: ;@smtp111.sbc.mail.gq1.yahoo.com
Subject: [Nfbf-l] Why You Should Take Naps

Why You Should Take Naps

We can no longer take this lack of sleep lying down!

Rethinking Sleep
By DAVID K. RANDALL
NYT Sunday Review, September 22, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/rethinking-sleep.html?_r=1&hp

SOMETIME in the dark stretch of the night it happens. Perhaps it's the chime
of an incoming text message. Or your iPhone screen lights up to alert you to
a new e-mail. Or you find yourself staring at the ceiling, replaying the day
in your head. Next thing you know, you're out of bed and engaged with the
world, once again ignoring the often quoted fact that eight straight hours
of sleep is essential.

Sound familiar? You're not alone. Thanks in part to technology and its
constant pinging and chiming, roughly 41 million people in the United States
nearly a third of all working adults get six hours or fewer of sleep a
night, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. And sleep deprivation is an affliction that crosses economic
lines. About 42 percent of workers in the mining industry are
sleep-deprived, while about 27 percent of financial or insurance industry
workers share the same complaint.

Typically, mention of our ever increasing sleeplessness is followed by calls
for earlier bedtimes and a longer night's sleep. But this directive may be
part of the problem. Rather than helping us to get more rest, the tyranny of
the eight-hour block reinforces a narrow conception of sleep and how we
should approach it. Some of the time we spend tossing and turning may even
result from misconceptions about sleep and our bodily needs: in fact neither
our bodies nor our brains are built for the roughly one-third of our lives
that we spend in bed.

The idea that we should sleep in eight-hour chunks is relatively recent. The
world's population sleeps in various and surprising ways. Millions of
Chinese workers continue to put their heads on their desks for a nap of an
hour or so after lunch, for example, and daytime napping is common from
India to Spain.

One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had
outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history
professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours
investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange
references to sleep. A character in the "Canterbury Tales," for instance,
decides to go back to bed after her "firste sleep." A doctor in England
wrote that the time between the "first sleep" and the "second sleep" was the
best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician
concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they
waited until after their "first sleep" to make love. Professor Ekirch soon
learned that he wasn't the only one who was on to the historical existence
of alternate sleep cycles. In a fluke of history, Thomas A. Wehr, a
psychiatrist then working at the National Institute of Mental Health in
Bethesda, Maryland, was conducting an experiment in which subjects were
deprived of artificial light. Without the illumination and distraction from
light bulbs, televisions or computers, the subjects slept through the night,
at least at first. But, after a while, Dr. Wehr noticed that subjects began
to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and
then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern of segmented sleep that
Professor Ekirch saw referenced in historical records and early works of
literature.

It seemed that, given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would
naturally settle into a split sleep schedule. Subjects grew to like
experiencing nighttime in a new way. Once they broke their conception of
what form sleep should come in, they looked forward to the time in the
middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in
the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous
activity. Most of us, however, do not treat middle-of-the-night awakenings
as a sign of a normal, functioning brain.

Doctors who peddle sleep aid products and call for more sleep may
unintentionally reinforce the idea that there is something wrong or
off-kilter about interrupted sleep cycles. Sleep anxiety is a common result:
we know we should be getting a good night's rest but imagine we are doing
something wrong if we awaken in the middle of the night. Related worries
turn many of us into insomniacs and incite many to reach for sleeping pills
or sleep aids, which reinforces a cycle that the Harvard psychologist Daniel
M. Wegner has called "the ironic processes of mental control."

As we lie in our beds thinking about the sleep we're not getting, we
diminish the chances of enjoying a peaceful night's rest.

This, despite the fact that a number of recent studies suggest that any deep
sleep whether in an eight-hour block or a 30-minute nap primes our brains to
function at a higher level, letting us come up with better ideas, find
solutions to puzzles more quickly, identify patterns faster and recall
information more accurately. In a NASA-financed study, for example, a team
of researchers led by David F. Dinges, a professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, found that letting subjects nap for as little as 24 minutes
improved their cognitive performance.

Related
Times Topic: Sleep

In another study conducted by Simon Durrant, a professor at the University
of Lincoln, in England, the amount of time a subject spent in deep sleep
during a nap predicted his or her later performance at recalling a short
burst of melodic tones. And researchers at the City University of New York
found that short naps helped subjects identify more literal and figurative
connections between objects than those who simply stayed awake.

Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School,
proposes that sleep including short naps that include deep sleep offers our
brains the chance to decide what new information to keep and what to toss.
That could be one reason our dreams are laden with strange plots and
characters, a result of the brain's trying to find connections between what
it's recently learned and what is stored in our long-term memory. Rapid eye
movement sleep so named because researchers who discovered this sleep
stage were astonished to see the fluttering eyelids of sleeping subjects is
the only phase of sleep during which the brain is as active as it is when we
are fully conscious, and seems to offer our brains the best chance to come
up with new ideas and hone recently acquired skills. When we awaken, our
minds are often better able to make connections that were hidden in the
jumble of information.

Gradual acceptance of the notion that sequential sleep hours are not
essential for high-level job performance has led to increased workplace
tolerance for napping and other alternate daily schedules.

Employees at Google, for instance, are offered the chance to nap at work
because the company believes it may increase productivity. Thomas Balkin,
the head of the department of behavioral biology at the Walter Reed Army
Institute of Research, imagines a near future in which military commanders
can know how much total sleep an individual soldier has had over a 24-hour
time frame thanks to wristwatch-size sleep monitors. After consulting
computer models that predict how decision-making abilities decline with
fatigue, a soldier could then be ordered to take a nap to prepare for an
approaching mission. The cognitive benefit of a nap could last anywhere from
one to three hours, depending on what stage of sleep a person reaches before
awakening.

Most of us are not fortunate enough to work in office environments that
permit, much less smile upon, on-the-job napping. But there are increasing
suggestions that greater tolerance for altered sleep schedules might be in
our collective interest. Researchers have observed, for example, that
long-haul pilots who sleep during flights perform better when maneuvering
aircraft through the critical stages of descent and landing.

Several Major League Baseball teams have adapted to the demands of a long
season by changing their sleep patterns. Fernando Montes, the former
strength and conditioning coach for the Texas Rangers, counseled his players
to fall asleep with the curtains in their hotel rooms open so that they
would naturally wake up at sunrise no matter what time zone they were in
even if it meant cutting into an eight-hour sleeping block. Once they
arrived at the ballpark, Montes would set up a quiet area where they could
sleep before the game. Players said that, thanks to this schedule, they felt
great both physically and mentally over the long haul.

Strategic napping in the Rangers style could benefit us all. No one argues
that sleep is not essential. But freeing ourselves from needlessly rigid and
quite possibly outdated ideas about what constitutes a good night's sleep
might help put many of us to rest, in a healthy and productive, if not
eight-hour long, block.

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