Right after eating you have an irrepressible desire to get comfortable, lie down on the sofa and bed, cover yourself with a blanket, close your eyes and sleep a comfortable and restful sleep. There are many benefits of a nap and they are also medically recognized. But when we have insomnia at night, the beloved nap may not be the best option.
The benefits of a nap
- The nap is not only a moment of rest that our body asks us for. It is also a time as restful as night sleep. Various studies present the benefits of a nap in the form of a mental cleansing that prepares us to be more active in the second part of the day. Greater concentration and more awake senses will accompany us the rest of the day with a good nap.
- For a nap to be beneficial and not harmful, it should be done right after eating, never late in the afternoon. In addition, when he talks about the benefits of a nap, he is not referring to those pajama and potty naps that Camilo José Celia liked so much, but a brief nap of between 20 and 30 minutes. Some NASA scientists have even dared to establish the perfect nap time at 26 minutes.
- Like a night’s sleep, a power nap requires darkness, a quiet environment free from noise, and plenty of relaxation. In this way, the nap is one of the best habits for a good quality of life. However, things change when we face an insomnia problem. In this case, the nap can become another enemy of sleep.
Nap for insomnia
- Napping is prohibited for people who suffer from insomnia. This is how forceful the sleep specialists are in this matter of the nap that is not without contradiction. Because it’s when we can’t sleep at night, when we’ve woken up a thousand times, when we haven’t rested, when we need a nap the most. And yet it is not convenient, because that can prevent us from sleeping at night, once again.
- It is true that it is very difficult to tell a person who has not slept a sleep all night, who has had a horrible morning at work because they were exhausted, because they couldn’t concentrate, to give up the nap. But it is about enduring a day in bad conditions in order to reach the night and be able to sleep. The nap is a “patch” when there is a sleep disorder and what we have to do is solve the origin of the problem. A nap will subtract hours from night sleep, making it impossible to recover the sleep cycle as well as its quality.
