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Jon Garay
Madrid
Wednesday, 21 August 2024, 17:11
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As a popular saying puts it: once you have eaten and drunk, what do you ask of me, my body? The answer is the Spanish 'siesta', that restorative nap after eating that serves to regain strength for the rest of the day. That is one reason to fall into the sweet arms of Morpheus after dinner. The other is purely out of habit, because we simply feel like it and especially now in summer, with the holidays, because we can afford it. Let's face it, the heat doesn't help us to stay active either. In short, these months are the perfect storm to fall asleep in 'postandrial' slumber, the scientific way of saying after eating.
It is not a bad thing, neither in summer nor during the rest of the year. Science has shown that it has nothing to do with being lazy and that it has very beneficial effects. "It has been shown to increase productivity at work. Some companies in Japan and other Asian countries force workers to rest and provide nap rooms. There are also improvements at a cognitive level, in concentration, reaction capacity, lower stress levels and reduced irritability," said María José Martínez, coordinator of the chronobiology working group of the Spanish sleep society (SES).
But what does the perfect nap look like, according to science? There are two fundamental factors to take into account: duration and timing. Regarding the former, "it should last between 10 and 30 minutes, no more," said the expert. As for the latter, Martínez recommended no later than 5pm.
The where and the how are also key issues. You can take a nap in bed "for comfort", but it is not advisable to lower the blinds. "The siesta of pyjamas and potty, as Camilo José Cela used to say, is not advisable. We must continue to give our body the signal that it is daytime, follow the circadian rhythms," Martínez said.
If we don't meet these conditions, we incur what specialists call "taking pressure off the night's sleep". "The problem is that if we get close to 90 minutes, to an hour and a half, we are doing a complete sleep cycle, which means removing a large amount of adenosine. Adenosine is a substance that accumulates in the body when we are awake. The more hours we are awake, the more adenosine accumulates. This is what we call the hunger for sleep. The more hours we go without sleep, the more of this hunger we have. And if we take away a full sleep cycle, we're going to withdraw a lot of this pressure for the night, so everything is going to be delayed and we're going to feel sleepy much later," Martinez said.
There's another reason why we don't want to overdo it. "We can wake up in the middle of a sleep phase and wake up much more groggy, almost worse than when we went to bed. This often happens when we go to sleep for two hours, and we wake up almost depressed, without energy. We have prolonged our nap and have entered too deep a sleep phase," added the specialist.
To prevent this from happening, an ally can be coffee, which has become fashionable to avoid naps which are too long. This is known as the coffee nap. "It consists of having a coffee just before going to bed. It has been shown that caffeine begins to take effect 15 to 20 minutes after ingestion. Drinking it just before going to sleep can help you wake up when it starts to take effect. And we would be more active than if we had not taken it," Martinez said. "I would not recommend this practice to those who do not usually drink coffee or cannot tolerate it, as it would be bad for them," she added.
Knowing all this, how is it that some people take naps of only ten minutes and at night are unable to sleep a wink and others nap after eating for three hours and have no problem falling asleep again later? It depends above all on the chronotype of each person, that is to say, what our time preference is, whether we are more active in the morning or in the afternoon. It also depends on how much adenosine we have accumulated, how many hours we have been awake and whether we need to reduce that sleep pressure or not," Martínez said.
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