Sleep Your Way to Health

What New Year’s resolution can build a supportive foundation for every other resolution regarding your health, wealth, and happiness? Make your sleep a priority.

Mental, physical and emotional health is intrinsically linked with how well-rested we are. It is only in the past few years, however, that we have begun to appreciate the importance of sleep and the danger of going without it. Now that science has begun directing its attention to the underworld of our consciousness, a disturbing conclusion is emerging. We are living with a fatigue epidemic and this silent culprit throws a wide net. Studies have shown that not getting the recommended eight hours can lead to increased risk for heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, and obesity. In the workplace, our productivity and mental abilities decrease with less sleep. We are more prone to accidents, waver in our alertness, decrease our memory skills, and make poor decisions. Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel, Director of National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute urged for increased spending on sleep research because “sleep loss and untreated sleep disorders have a substantial impact on public health and safety.” A 2006 report from the Committee on Sleep Medicine and Research placed the total direct and indirect costs of sleep disorders in the U.S. each year at “hundreds of billions of dollars.”

So what to do? Well, we can’t create a 25^th hour, and the traditional siesta practice of shuttering our doors for four hours in the middle of the day doesn’t appeal to today’s market economy. Fortunately, science has provided an intelligent, viable alternative: the nap. Studies of daytime napping have shown that performance on a wide range of memory, attention and alertness measures can be increased with a short midday snooze. These studies report that naps as short as five minutes can actually restore alertness and cognitive abilities.

If you are in the minority of people who get your full eight hours sleep every night, (first of all, keep up the good work!), but don’t rest on your laurels too fast. All of the napping studies that my laboratory conducts examines only well-rested adults. We test subjects once in the morning on a battery of memory tasks and then half of them are allowed to take a nap and half go about their normal business, then all subjects are retest in the afternoon. We find that nappers performance significantly improves in the afternoon, and that non-nappers performance significantly deteriorates. That’s right, even well-rested people are vulnerable to the proverbial afternoon slump.

How do we begin? As with most things in life, if we want to see change happen we must start with ourselves and be models for the way we want the world to be. First, its important to get a picture of your sleep history and present needs. Are you working two jobs, and need to find more energy for your family at the end of the day? Are you heading into retirement and want enough spring in your step to enjoy an active lifestyle? Are you finding that your sleep schedule is changing so that you seem to be sleeping less and less at night? Are you most active before the sun comes up but around midday find it difficult to make it through a whole day? These are all profiles of people with different sleep needs and each has a customized nap just for them.

Here is the fun part. You have just learned that naps actually work. But the secret to great napping is in understanding that not all naps are created equal. Research has shown that sleep can be broken down into several stages, and that each sleep stage contributes to improvements on specific cognitive processes. In “Take a Nap! Change Your Life”, I outline the benefits of napping,  provide new nappers with the basic tools for learning how to become an efficient intelligent napper, and teach advanced nappers how to tailor their nap to suit their particular needs. If you make one resolution to yourself this year, let it be that sleep becomes a priority in your life, for yourself, your career, and your family.

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Sara Mednick, Ph.D., is a research scientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. She is a consultant for the military and private business, and her napping research has been covered by CNN, Reuters, NPR, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Real Simple, and Men’s Journal. She has a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard and lives in San Diego.