2013 Faith (in)Wellness Challenge Week Recap: Take a Nap

After a week of taking a break from Wellness, I was ready to take some naps.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, naps of 20-30 minutes can improve our moods, our alertness and our overall performance at work or on important projects. Plus, they just feel good.

To avoid that groggy, sleepy feeling you sometimes get after taking a nap, keep your naps short. Sometimes referred to as power naps, these short slumbers are a great break in the middle of the day, especially when you’re starting to feel overwhelmed or burnt out.

As a sleep deprived nation, it’s important we remember what sleeping actually does for the body. Besides helping us manage our energy by shutting the body’s normal wakeful needs down, sleep provides restorative benefits as well. As we sleep, our cells are hard at work restoring and rejuvenating from the inside out. Thus, sleep is important for our digestion, our skin, and it gives our heart a break by slowing things down.

Listening to our bodies’ needs and acting on the information provided to us will help us sync with our body’s natural functioning. One could argue this will lead us to our own unique optimum performance. The issue then becomes syncing our body’s natural functioning with the demands of our daily lives. Herein lies the art and science of energy management.

The next time you’re sleepy, give yourself the permission to take a short nap. The perceived loss of productivity will most likely be gained when you’re able to think more clearly and perform tasks more efficiently post-nap.

You may even take one step further and try preventative napping – lying down when you aren’t even tired. Your nap will still provide you the same benefits and you can stock up your energy bank in advance before hitting empty.

Whatever you do, avoid correlating naps with laziness. Quite the contrary, naps are tools to help you match your body’s needs to your daily demands. After all, the more you feel great, the more you’ll get done. This is why taking a nap is actually a smart response to tiredness.

Funny how that works.

Are you a napper? When is your favorite time to snooze? Let me know in the comments below!

Image credit: chooyutshing