Effectiveness of Power Nap
Christopher Ketcham at Men’s Journal has written a article on power nap. In our previous introduction of power nap, polyphasic sleep involves the sleep pattern of 90 minutes. In this article, they have looked into compressing the nap into 20 minutes, by going through first two out of five of sleeping stages:
… Here’s how the power nap works: Sleep comes in five stages that recur cyclically throughout a typical night, and a power nap seeks to include just the first two of them. The initial stage features the sinking into sleep as electrical brain activity, eye and jaw-muscle movement, and respiration slow. The second is a light but restful sleep in which the body gets ready — lowering temperature, relaxing muscles further — for the entry into the deep and dreamless “slow-wave sleep,” or SWS, that occurs in stages three and four. Stage five, of course, is REM, when the eyes twitch and dreaming becomes intense.
The five stages repeat every 90 to 120 minutes. Stage one can last up to 10 minutes, stage two until the 20th minute. Extenuating circumstances, like manning the controls of a jet, aside, experts believe that the optimal power nap should roughly coincide with the first 20 minutes in order to give you full access to stage two’s restorative benefits…
The only catch is that you have to carefully time your nap to avoid waking in slow-wave sleep (third stage), which can produce sleep inertia. My question is, how to time it exactly to avoid being wake up in third stage when you are unsure when you fell asleep? It is not a easy task. Even this power napping is working - It will be hard to get implemented.
Snooze, You Win - Improve your mental and physical performance by power napping - [Men's Journal]
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Comments
Joel says on December 28th, 2005 at 11:41 am
I’ve been thinking about the 90-minute sleep cycle and metabolism. If it were possible to wake up after the end of the final stage and do a mildly intense cardio workout to get the heart rate up before going to sleep -and then repeat this process after the end of the next 90 minute cycle-do you think it could have an impact on overall metabolism rates?.
Leon says on December 29th, 2005 at 12:34 am
@Joel: Are you trying to speed up your metabolism, right? Steve found that after he have used polyphasic sleep, his metabolism seems went down.
I haven’t got your idea behind on doing work-out after each polyphasic sleep cycle yet. Can you briefly describe your theory?
Kay says on March 6th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
There’s a good technique to wake up around the right moment. My father, who was pilot for the navy, told me that tip he used when on alert: you have to be able to sleep while sitting (not everyone manage to do that, while some others can sleep in almost any position…), and have a good position or you might have tensions everywhere, which is not what you want.
Hold a teaspoon or other metallic object between two of your fingers; it has to hang so you don’t have to hold it too firmly, yet if you totally relax your hand it falls. Hold it at some height above the table. When you’re about to enter deep sleep and your muscles relax, the teaspoon will fall and most probably wake you up (these things are noisy when they want). Usually that’s the right time, and you feel refreshed - even if being woken up by a teaspoon is never sweet.
I used that technique many times during intensive work periods, and it worked nicely, so I thought I would share.