Over the years, the idea of taking a nap was seen as a sign of laziness and sloth. Upon further examination, napping is a biological behavior that turns out to be a very powerful tool. It forces both physical and cognitive restoration. It has been determined that humans have an ingrained sleep pattern. Our internal clock often triggers a natural dip in alertness sometime between 1-3pm in the afternoon. That lack of alertness occurs even if you had a good night’s sleep the night before.

That opened the door to show that benefits can be achieved with only a minimal amount of time invested. Studies have shown that a short nap, just 20 to 30 minutes, can improve your mood, your motor skills and increase alertness. They’re also known as power naps. It’s still a nap and not sleep because it doesn’t push your brain into deep REM stages of unconsciousness.

Although your body may tell you it needs to rest, scientists recommend not going for the 60 to 90 minute nap schedule. That could include a deep REM. The deep REM sleep during this extended nap time has positive restorative phases, memory reading and emotional processing. The downside is the deep sleep you may feel when you wake up disoriented, which is not ideal.

A 20 minute nap will be good for your alertness when you wake up. And for you puzzle hounds go right to the puzzle section of your newspaper to play Wordle or the crossword. While you’re not awake, your brain is problem solving without you even thinking about it. It’s putting in those letters to spell the words you can’t get off the tip of your tongue. I play a lot of puzzle games, but oftentimes I’m stumped. But when I go back to it an hour later, it miraculously comes to me. That’s because even though I’m unaware of it my brain is problem solving during my nap. After a morning nap, I solved wordle in three moves with “juice” and completed the crossword by writing in “pulp fiction.” 

The great result of the afternoon nap is an increase in your short-term memory. Say you were learning a new skill. Yet you failed to recall some of the steps involved. During a nap your brain is still trying to solve the issue and more times than not leads you to the right solution. When you come out of your nap it gives the brain time to replay and consolidate what it has learned and engage new information into long term storage.

Naps also provide an emotional benefit as they regulate your moods. Suppose you’re at work stumped on a frustrating mission. Your lack of progress would anger you in the past. It is 3:00 in the afternoon and you have two more hours in the office. You decide it would not be beneficial to take a nap now because it would interfere with your nighttime sleep. Well, rest assured. Give it rest. The timing of a 20 minute nap has nothing to do with what’s beneficial for your nighttime deep REM sleep.

Recently some office buildings in corporate America began providing a safe place for their employees to take a nap. They solve problems that it’s almost impossible to do with the distractions and irregular work environment. As a matter of fact, some businesses in Corporate America area have opened this place where you rent a nap room for 20 minutes. They provide you with everything you need for a good nap. You want soft music? No problem. You want an image? We’ve got your favorite photographs of Sullivan County. A nice bed with clean sheets awaits. You book a time like you would with a training session at the gym.

Many famous people have derived benefits from taking a nap. Thomas Edison had cots scattered around his laboratory at Menlo Park, NJ. Naps were part of his daily routine. He said his naps were necessary to fuel the invention. Ironically, if Edison wanted to get a good nap he had to shut off one of his well-known inventions, the light bulb. Napoleon Bonaparte would often take quick naps even when surrounded by chaos and battle. He firmly believed that those short breaks gave him the strength to come up with the right strategy in the next move. World leaders like Winston Churchill and John Fitzgerald Kennedy were big proponents of taking a daily nap. They felt that shutting the system down, even for 10 minutes a day, gave them better productivity and might help the world.

All this talk of naps and sleep is making me drowsy. Maybe next week I’ll explore yawning.

Hudson Cooper is a resident of Sullivan County, a writer, comedian and actor.