[Nfbf-l] Why You Should Take Naps

[Alan Dicey]

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.