Are Naps Good for You? | Hacker News Reader

Are Naps Good for You?

scientificamerican.com

52 pointsBender63 comments

Our bodies are pretty good at telling us what it needs. Drink when you're thirsty and nap when you're drowsy. The problem we find, which elicits articles like this, is that our 'work environment' is not conducive to adhoc relaxation.

~75% of adults in the US are overweight. ~20% have a sleep disorder.

So are ~53% of adults in the EU. And there are more obese kids than before in the EU too: knowing that there's an insane statistic saying something like 93% of obese kids shall stay obese their entire life, that 53% in the EU is only ever gonna go up (unless there's serious food shortage due to a war or climate event).

>knowing that there's an insane statistic saying something like 93% of obese kids shall stay obese their entire life

How is that statistic insane? People rarely shed weight just like that, when they do it takes concentrated effort and persistence. And even if you do, it's dead easy to get it back on in like a few months...

That's because modern life goes against our evolutionary instict.

They weren't developed for when a several trillion dollar industry is hell-bent on selling addictive, over-processed, sodium, sugar, corn syrup etc fulled food-stuff crap, and showings as 100s of ads throughout a signle day. Not for spending our whole days in chairs, staring at a screen, and then relaxing by staring at more screens.

A much much smaller percentage share of adults in the US were overweight before the 80s and 70s.

I'd venture a guess a much smaller share had a sleep disorder before TV, long car commutes, and artificial lights too.

What point are you trying to make?

I wonder what the numbers would look like if nobody had to work. That's the comparison.

On the whole, I agree with you, but sometimes there are actually issues and that's why we get sick, when the body response is out of wack or lacking. Sometimes it's less about being tired and more about something which causes you to be tired, like being stuck in an unwanted situation.

But yes, our work environment are full of dogmatic rules and preconceptions which are hard to break.

On a similar note, something I've observed is that the feeling of tiredness in the afternoon doesn't necessarily correlate with how much I've done in the hours prior.

Recently I started doing more things in the morning hours, with the hope that I'd be more effective at those tasks (especially the more mentally taxing ones) earlier in the day than when I had been doing them previously, which was typically in the afternoon or evening.

Intuitively, this would lead to better productivity in the earlier half of the day at the cost of reducing it in the latter half. Instead, my afternoon and evening energy levels remained unchanged or even improved a bit, meaning that I now get more done with no apparent cost. This is of course welcome but it was quite unexpected, and suggests that some amount of the "tired" feeling is more a result of conditioning than energy expenditure.

Most of my afternoon fatigue comes down to eating too much or too many carbs at lunch. There's an amount that is just right...and beyond that, I definitely start down-shifting. (YMMV, of course!)

Yeah, it's quite interesting how energy works, AFAIK we still don't know if task fatigue is really a thing or not. But if it isn't, doing more in the morning would not leave you more tired than usual, assuming you get regular good sleep.

The body can be affected by so many things, and it's different for people what affects them. What you eat in the morning, sunlight exposure and consistent bedtimes is what worked best for me. I get an afternoon slump no matter what I do, but that is usually remedied by some physical exercise or breathing exercises I've found, and the longer I go without taking naps, the more my natural rhythm gets used to not sleeping at that point. But I've had periods with extra stress where I just need to take naps, but that is just something I've accepted and enjoy now when it happens.

Counterexamples: body tells you to eat more when stressed or depressed.

A bit of stress is healthy for the body. Your body doesn’t really tell you to go to the gym.

> Your body doesn’t really tell you to go to the gym.

I think there are, when I was lifting heavy my muscles would start to have a softer feeling to them if i was a way for a bit. Away from exercise now, Ill start to feel a little bloated and fat. maybe feeling fat is in my head.

If im sedentary for long ill have a feeling like I should get up and do something. hard to explain what it is thinking about it now.

> Your body doesn’t really tell you to go to the gym.

Oh it does. I feel like crap (including mentally) if I don't go for a few days.

Yes, but if you don't go for a year, it will tell you the opposite...

The gym didn't exist as our bodies evolved. But neither did grocery stores. Stress and depression pushing you to eat more is your body telling you to get moving, in the past eating more required exerting a lot more effort.

I suppose not only to get moving but also to get cooperating with fellow hunters (i.e. social behavior).

Working out give me a mood boost. I've found that if I skip workouts for a couple of months, I'm more prone to depressive moods, which is an alarm to get my ass back to the gym.

yes an I personally find that tiredness and ability to handle stress is directly correlated to amount of sleep I'm getting.

In winter I tend to stay up later at night, I get less sleep and I eat very poorly. I always put on weight and get cranky in winter.

It seems possibly counterproductive to equate "exercise" with "stress". I find I am invariably much less stressed, emotionally, during and after exercise. I am not convinced that any amount of "stress" is good for you.

I am an old man and have learned some things about myself. I was an athlete when younger and am quite good at listening to what my various parts say when it comes to injuries or various kinds of use. Others in my age group like my wife who spent less time doing athletic work when younger are lacking this signal and get injured more often.

However I also worked quite a lot when younger and do not at all hear my body say it is tired or thirsty. Getting an Oura ring has been tremendously helpful, having a signal in terms of tiredness and proper sleep quantity. I take naps now when my "readiness" is low.

I have no signal when it comes to thirst, but can report that getting a fancy ice machine and a fancy seltzer maker in the last few years to make it fun to stay hydrated has been a total life changer. I now drink 3-4 quarts of water a day and I notice on the other side of that all kinds of improvements. But I do not recognize their absenses if I don't follow the drinking regemin. I mean, I do a little bit now, but not really.

Upshot: bodies are probably equally good at generating signal but every brain has different training and tuning as to which signals it picks up, and which ones it ignores.

Cheers.

Did your body say it was tired or thirsty when you were young?

Rarely. I routinely worked through the night, usually drinking dehydrating light caffeine drinks like tea. I wouldn't get the tired signal until sometime the next day or day after. And a few times I was so dehydrated I had mini-migraines. It was just a groove and I went with it, for hours, hundreds/thousands of times.

According to multiple studies 50-75% of adults in first world countries don’t drink enough water.

You're absolutely right, one additional point though is that if you're drowsy right now napping is good, but you should also maybe reflect on what's making you drowsy. That carb heavy meal you had? Better scale those down, it's not good for you. The alcohol you had last night that disturbed your sleep (even one beer is enough for that)? Not good for you.

Napping is the right thing to do right now, but there might be overarching changes you should do in your behavior to not be drowsy tomorrow.

> Our bodies are pretty good at telling us what it needs. Drink when you're thirsty and nap when you're drowsy.

On average, maybe. While the science of how to reproducibly measure the variations is still fairly young, there's evidence that the accuracy/responsiveness of the underlying signals, the baseline intensity of the sensations, and the ability to integrate those sensations into an actionable concept like "thirsty" or "drowsy" all exist on a spectrum [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6054486/

I wish this worked for me. Napping when I'm drowsy results in me being more drowsy. Drinking water when I'm thirsty at least mostly only means more trips to the bathroom.

Rather than naps, I can personally recommend yoga nidra, AKA non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) meditation. There's no effort involved. You just lie down and listen to an audio track. Lots of tracks available on YouTube and Spotify. With yoga nidra, you stay awake and get just as recharged from a good nap but without the risk of waking up groggy. It's a game changer.

If you're interested in the science behind it, Andrew Huberman often talks about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rSOn0PurVc

This is my favorite yoga nidra track on spotify (30 min):

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0LXBzjxhdJDFiW2CWINGb3

And here's a shorter one (10 min) from Andrew Huberman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKGrmY8OSHM

> With yoga nidra, you stay awake

Huh I precisely use yoga nidra TO help me fall asleep.

It's so powerful as a sleep aid that I resurrected an old iPod to hold a single yoga nidra track and I keep it plugged into a speaker on my nightstand. Of the maybe 200+ listens in the past few years I've heard the end of of this 20min track less than 10 times!

Nice! And good point. It works for both sleep and non-sleep power "nap."

There are different scripts for sleep vs mid-day rest. The main difference seems to be whether or not you set the intention to stay awake or fall asleep at the start of it.

Interesting, I shall try this for rest as I hate naps - they leave me miserable.

Note that you shouldn't be groggy if you limit your naps to less than 20 minutes.

But, how do you limit your naps to 20 minutes? What if it takes 19 minutes to fall asleep and then your alarm goes off after 1 minute of sleep?

Sometimes you know how long you usually need to fall asleep, for me it's 5-10 min or I am not falling asleep (for a nap). So I set the timer to 35min.

> What if it takes 19 minutes to fall asleep and then your alarm goes off after 1 minute of sleep?

That's a successful nap.

IME there's not much difference between 1 minute of sleep and 15 minutes. Both give me a similar recharge. I think a large part of it is relaxing enough to actually fall asleep.

https://www.livescience.com/little-known-sleep-stage-may-be-...

It's why meditation apps can be so useful, there are so many options in the 10-20 minute range and you feel much better than trying to time a nap and setting a horrible alarm sound to wake you up.

Most of them also have nice endings, in that they encourage you to stretch or something of the sort to "wake up" from your meditation.

Why you need to follow specific techniques just to relax? They sound like more work and skill obsession.

You know, you can just lay low and relax...

Why read a science book when you can, you know, just figure it out?

Yoga is a tradition honed over millennia, it's weird to assume that your first swag at the topic is just as good.

You don't need to learn any new techniques. That's why NSDR / yoga nidra is useful. You just listen to a track. No breathing techniques or anything required. Same idea I guess as listening to music for productivity or workouts. Do you need it? Nope. But it helps.

For many of us, just laying down to "relax" tends mean either scrolling through news, or closing our eyes and getting lost in racing thoughts while trying to resist the urge to take out our phone scroll through news...

Obviously, that's not great, so strategies to relax more naturally can be really helpful.

Saying "just relax, it's natural" is like saying "just be a marathon runner, it's natural". Both may be true, but in 2023 it can take some work and help for us to get back to those natural abilities.

There's a reason mindfulness and meditation is a thing people do for mental health. If we could all easily just, you know, chill out, then a lot of issues people face with anxiety and stress wouldn't exist :)

Like how the simple recipe for happiness is "stop being sad"

> You just lie down and listen to an audio track.

> you stay awake

Yeah... If I lie down, I will not be staying awake.

Perhaps you have to choose the audio track such that you don't fall asleep.

Yes, the track matters. A good track for non-sleep deep rest will have you set an intention not to fall asleep and then keep your mind busy doing a body scan. I was the same way... skeptical I'd stay awake. But it actually works.

Try this track https://open.spotify.com/episode/0LXBzjxhdJDFiW2CWINGb3

One time, after sleeping only 3 hours, I held a rope on someone's backpack, and hiked 2 hours with my eyes closed, just following them (and stumbling). I even conversed the whole time and hiked 4 more hours, and afterwards I felt rested enough to finish the day.

Andrew Huberman, the same guy who panders chewing on a rubber ball to change your “face shape”?

Yeah, the same guy who "heard from a cardiologist buddy" of his that 'no amount of exercise offsets the damage of sitting for 6-7 hours a days' (absolute bullshit icydk).

you’re mocking his weak references but you’re not offering one yourself

I think it's completely fine to be extremely skeptical of, and yes even outright mock, the idea that sitting for 6 hours a day does permanent, irreparable damage to the body until proven otherwise. It's also probably fine to be skeptical-bordering-on-mocking of people who use sources that sound authoritative to push something controversial. It's really hard to become a cardiologist. They know a great deal about a lot of things, but you know what they typically don't know anything about? Exercise. They're not physical therapists, they're not exercise physiologists, they don't have PhDs in kinesiology.

Sitting is bad for you, sure. But some random guy's random cardiologist friend likely knows less about exercise science than a $50/hr personal trainer at your local Gold's.

Not saying you're wrong, but isn't it strange to respond to an article that attempts to answer a question by summarizing several scientific studies, with something akin to "ignore that, do this instead"?

Good point. I didn't provide context in my comment. Just trying to be helpful. The studies in the article show naps improve several factors like alertness. Anecdotally, many people either have a hard time falling asleep mid day or fall asleep for too long and wake up groggy. Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) has the same benefits of napping without the downsides. I believe there are studies on it, but I don't have references handy. Just speaking from personal experience.

About yoga nidra : wikipedia tells us about a n=1 study[0] that found NREM sleep waves during yoga nidra, it seems that if this generalize, it would be equivalent to taking a nap [0]: https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.pbr.2018.10.016

I often take a quick 20-30 min nap in the afternoon if i feel like it, and i always feel super refreshed, and ready to do some focused work again for a couple of hours.

So i would say yes, if you feel sleepy or drowsy a short power nap can work wonders.

Of course since I am working from home most of the time i can just jump on the couch. In an office this is not really possible.

Same for me.

Key is that it is a “micronap,” in my recliner (<15 minutes, sometimes, repeated, once or twice).

I feel a bit “fuzzy,” on waking, but I’m 100%, after just a couple of minutes on my feet.

If I lie down, my day is done.

Google had "nap pods." I don't know if they still do. You could book them via the calendaring system.

It was like a big half-sphere that covered your upper body & head, but left your legs exposed. You were still sitting, not reclining. You could have headphones with white noise.

I tried them. Not very sleepy, for me.

If you can sleep in one of those you were probably too sleepy to safely drive home. Possible lifesaver.

Love me a quick 20-30 minute nap in the car at work. I start out with a big stress bundle in my chest and it’s all gone after. The article mentions this phenomenon as lowering blood pressure and heart rate

Every single one of these 'quantified self' health/wellness trends conclude with "listen to your body, and do what feels right"

So then... what did I need the study/supplement/podcast/coaching/snake oil for?

That goes for so much stuff today, not just the health and wellness trends. Capitalism has created entire markets through obscurity, complexity, and exploiting human traits to make people think they need stuff they don't.

Our generation(s) did to tech what our parents did to the economy :(

yes or no?

"Garfield and her colleagues at University College London have found that regular brief naps seem to improve brain health in the long run"

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