Season 4 Episode 5: Rest: The Dreaded Napping Experiment

Most people think that napping is great! A little break during the middle of the day. But Nancy HATES naps, with a fiery passion

Most people think that napping is great! A little break during the middle of the day. But Nancy HATES naps, with a fiery passion. They don't help her feel refreshed, and she just wakes up feeling yucky. But! She has a sinking suspicion that if she gave the whole napping thing a try her way, then maybe she could make napping work for her. So Nancy embarks on the dreaded NAPPING EXPERIMENT... DUN DUN DUN. And chats again with Dr. Sara Mednick to learn: what's so great about napping?

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• Nancy's personal relationship with napping.

• Nancy's journey to accomplish the NAPPING EXPERIMENT... DUN DUN DUN.

• Insight into why napping could work for you with sleep expert Dr. Sara Mednick.

• Tips for folks with HFA who want to try napping for themselves.

+ Read the Transcript

Happier Approach Season 4 Episode 5 Napping Transcript Nancy Jane Smith: Hey guys, it's me, Nancy Jane Smith. Welcome back to The Happier Approach, the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace and relationships. In today's episode, I confront a topic that feels kind of divisive. At least to me, napping. I really don't like napping.

And sometimes, when I'm upfront about my anti-napping stance, people are like, but why? Naps are amazing. Honestly, I just don't get it. And those pro nappers extolling the virtues of a midday snooze tend to provoke my high functioning. My Monger jumps in; why can't you just be normal and enjoy napping?

What's wrong with you? So I decided to take a shot at this whole napping thing, but to try to do it in a way that makes sense for me. I hate napping. It isn't just that I don't take the time to nap or I don't allow myself a nap. I mean, those things are true too. But truthfully, my hatred of naps overrides all other reasons.

Case in point. As part of this episode, my assignment was to take a nap and see if it made a difference in my life. The benign assignment of taking a nap evolved quickly into the Napping Challenge. The Challenge, take a nap for 60 minutes and record how I feel before and after that. Is it nothing too intense or complex? Take a nap. But you would've thought the assignment was to put needles under my fingernails, for as much as I dreaded doing it. Nikki, my producer, gave me the rough deadline of early next week when we chatted on the previous Wednesday. I added the nap challenge to my Google reminders, which also show up on our Google Nest hub in the kitchen.

So Thursday at 9:00 AM, the British Google voice from the kitchen announces, "I have a reminder for Nancy Jane: do the napping experiment." Oh, my husband said, today's the day, huh? Well, technically, I have until early next week, which I figure means Wednesday at the latest, but I want to give myself some time to be thinking about it.

Okay. My husband said, skeptically. Why do you hate naps so much? He who naps every day didn't quite understand my hatred of naps. Well, I said, I rarely feel refreshed after a nap, and I usually wake up feeling nauseous and gross. Basically, the complete opposite of me, right? My husband said, yep. I replied as I returned.

The truth is I do occasionally take a nap falling asleep in the middle of a movie or TV show, but being deliberate about crawling into bed and taking a nap always left me feeling nauseated and unrefreshed, exceptions for if I'm sick or in my drinking days when I was hungover. I also have memories of college, rushing to my dorm room between classes to nap for 20.

I could not have survived college without those 20-minute naps, whether in my room or resting my head on my desk in the library when studying. I got much less sleep in college than I do now, so I needed those naps to survive the day. But I do have some positive experiences with napping. Okay, back to the NAP Challenge.

To fight the nausea, I decided to take the nap before lunch, and because I dreaded the nap so much, I gave myself some grace on time. When I talked to the sleep expert, Dr. Sara Mednick, more from her in a minute, she said that ideally, you rest for 30 to 60 minutes, so I'm going for 30 minutes. That feels more do.

Friday at 9:00 AM, the British Google voice from the kitchen announces. "I have a reminder for Nancy Jane: do the napping experiment."

"Is today the day?!" my husband said.

"Nope." I replied, "not today and not tomorrow. I am too busy to nap, but Sunday, I think I'll nap when we get home from Mom's".

Sunday. I rolled around, and I was too wired after Mom's to sleep, so I told myself Monday it had to happen on Monday.

Monday at 9:00 AM, the British Google voice from the kitchen announces, "I have a reminder for Nancy Jane: do the napping experiment." Yep, I'm going to do it today. By Monday, my day had exploded, and I had run out of time.

By 2:00 PM, my Monger was weighing in: "Good grief. What is the deal? You have to nap? Cry me a river. Why is that so terrible? You're such a crybaby."

Also, my Monger was saying, "Napping, you're going to nap?!? You have work to do."

Finally, on Tuesday, I didn't even set the reminder on Google because I had procrastinated as long as I could. I knew today was the day.

With much dread and pain, I napped, and here's how it went. So it's Tuesday. Today's a Tuesday. I have to take a nap. That's all it is. I have to take a nap in the middle of the day to experiment with it. And I hate napping. I hate it with a passion. I hate everything about it. I hate getting undressed and getting into bed.

I hate, um, Relaxing enough in the middle of the day to fall asleep. I hate, um, when I wake up, I don't always feel better, so there's not much about it that's pleasant. But the one thing that is pleasant about it is my cat Gus is lying here. He is a napping pro showing me the power of napping as he lies here on the quilt next to me. So I am going to nap for 30 minutes. I set the alarm and, um, we'll see how I feel after 30 minutes. Here we go. Okay, Gus, Gus Mama's coming into bed. What do you think?

Oh, hm.

Let's leave me here for now. Drifting not so peacefully off to. And as I float into dreamland, I want to revisit the conversation I had earlier in the season with Dr. Sara Mednick, as we know from before. She's a sleep researcher, and she's also an expert on napping. She wrote a whole book about it. It's called Take a Nap, Change Your Life.

I was skeptical that taking a nap would change my life. So I asked Sara to explain what's so great about napping.

Tell me about the power of napping. I was going to say something more profound, but I'm going to go basic.

Sara Mednick: When I started grad school, I was working with a guy who was doing nighttime sleep. What he was showing was that you need. Six to eight hours of nighttime sleep to show any kind of benefits for memory. I came in, I'm like, yeah, but like people who nap, they wake up, and they feel amazing, and they've only had, say, half an hour or an hour of sleep.

Nancy Jane Smith: Sara wondered how could that be possible that you need six to eight hours of sleep to get a full night's rest, but you could also feel good after a short nap?

Sara Mednick: So he's like, well, why didn't you study it?

Nancy Jane Smith: So that's what she did. Sara tested people in her lab, having them nap for different lengths of time and comparing them to people who didn't nap.

Sara Mednick: And what we found is that you could get in a 90-minute nap where you go through all the different sleep stages, you could get the same magnitude of learning benefits from a nap as you could from a full night of sleep. And it was really. It was so astonishing.

Nancy Jane Smith: Based on her research, Sara wrote her book about napping, and it actually made a lot of nappers feel seen.

Sara Mednick: Everybody who's been napping suddenly felt so, uh, supported, and napping is looked at as being, you know, for people who are lazy, and you know what's wrong with you? Why do you need to sleep during the day? You should be up and working. What my research shows is actually, these people are really smart, and they're doing just as much, if not more, learning than you know and being more creative than people who are not napping.

After I published that book, I did a study looking at people who don't like to nap. Like there was a whole bunch of people that said like, I, I hate napping. I feel terrible after I nap.

Nancy Jane Smith: Yes, I fall into that category. Yeah.

Sara Mednick: And. That's really interesting how it's rare in life that you hear such a strong hatred for something.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. And that was like, I need to study that. So we actually did some research on people who are non-nappers, and I tried to see, well, do non-nappers get any benefits from them?

Nancy Jane Smith: Sara even tried to train non-nappers to see if they could turn into Nappers,

Sara Mednick: and it turns out that about 50% of the population are non-nappers, and those people don't really get any benefits from the nap.

And even when I train them to nap, they don't get any benefits.

Nancy Jane Smith: I know. I know my husband is a napper. He loves to nap and has to do it. He's one of those, gets a lot of benefits out of it, and he's like, you should nap, you should nap. And it always makes me feel worse. And so you have validated my life here with this because I was beating myself up for the fact I must be doing it wrong, you know?

Sara Mednick: Yeah. Well many. Naps, marry non-naps. Oh, interesting. It's very interesting. I mean, its opposites attract or something, but it actually causes a lot of marital strife. Mm-hmm. , I could see that because the non-napper is looking at this person like, I'm doing all this work and you are napping.

You're like, what the hell? You know, and the napper feels. Browbeaten and also like, but I need this. And like, you know, like, I feel like hell like a zombie if I don't get my nap. Right. So, so there's a real disconnect here/

Nancy Jane Smith: Yeah. We don't have that, and I could see where it would lend to marital strife. I enjoy that he takes a nap because then I get the house to myself.

Sara Mednick: Ah, that's, well, that's another good point. Enjoy it.

Nancy Jane Smith: Right. So what's the, so is it the same? What does the brain do differently when we nap versus when we sleep a full night? Or is it that you're finding it's the same?

Sara Mednick: So the sleep is the same.

You know, when you look at the brain, the brain's doing the same thing, but the confirmation of sleep across the nighttime is very different than across the day.

Nancy Jane Smith: Sara says that we have two different pressures that contribute to our sleep.

Sara Mednick: S one of them is a circadian pressure that kind of makes sure that we have a lot of energy and resources for daytime activity.

And then we have this, you know, low circadian rhythm during the night. Um, and that can determine one aspect of our sleep and then another rhythm. Is this homeostatic sleep pressure rhythm that determines how much slow-wave sleep we have? So you have this balance between these two different pressures that determine how your sleep looks across the whole night and at nighttime because you've been awake all day and you've been.

Busy being means when you get to sleep at first, what you need is to have a lot of slow wave sleep because that's the most restorative and repairing sleep.

Nancy Jane Smith: The first few hours of sleep are usually slow sleep. It gets that name because of the big slow delta waves that you see on an EEG when a person is in this stage.

Sara Mednick: And then once you satisfy your need for slowly sleep, then you get into the second half of the night, which has a lot of REM sleep. And in order to get sort of a good amount of slow sleep followed by rem, you actually have to sleep through the whole night.

Nancy Jane Smith: But obviously, if you're napping, you're not going to sleep through the whole night.

So how can you still get the benefits of that sleep cycle in the middle of

Sara Mednick: the. There's actually a point in the middle of the day when most people do get tired, and this is truly when the siestas always occur during this time. And this is the time when you can have a nap that has equal amounts of slow wave sleep and REM sleep, and you could just have this, you know, hour, 90-minute nap.

Um, and it's kind of the perfect, optimal. And that's, that's sort of the secret, I think, as to why, um, naps can give you such powerful results is because it's like, you know, a mini night, you don't have to sleep all night to get both slowly sleep and rem you can just take this nap in the middle of the day to have both slowly sleep and rem.

Nancy Jane Smith: So 60 minutes to 90 minutes is the best. Is there a time of day that's better, or It depends per person?

Sara Mednick: It depends per person. Because of these different pressures of circadian rhythm and the homeostatic rhythm, depending on what time of day you're napping will determine what type of nap you have, how much slow wave sleep you have, and how much REM sleep you have.

Nancy Jane Smith: That allows people to take control of, okay, what do I want from.

Sara Mednick: I want to be more creative, or I want to do more memory consolidation, I want to do more muscle repair. Any of that kind of stuff that would determine, well, I need more slow sleep, or I need more REM sleep. And so then you set the dial to what time you wake up, and then you can determine what time of day your nap is going to have more slowly sleep or more.

Nancy Jane Smith: REM sleep. Well, we're about to find out what kind of nap I had. Slow sleep. Deep sleep as I rise up from dreamland to the sound of my alarm.

Well, there goes Calvin,

My initial reaction is it took me a long time to fall asleep, and I finally fell a little bit asleep. I think for the last 10 minutes, I probably could have done an hour nap maybe, but I was trying to keep it short because I do I think the length is what gets me in trouble when I've done it in the past.

So I will report more in a little bit.

Okay. Well, I did it.

And, um, 42 minutes of rest. Yeah, it took a long time to fall asleep. I did 37 minutes. I crawled into bed, and it was like, I think I had 20 minutes left, so I'd been lying there for 17 minutes, and I just checked the clock to be like, how long have I been like, here? And then I started thinking about someone I went to college with, and I was like, where did she end up?

And I'm like, Ooh, I want to Google her. And so then that was something that. It took me down a rabbit hole, and I was trying to remember her name, her last name, and, but I think I fell asleep, and then Calvin came up and joined me. But like you tried really hard to sleep in your 30 minutes. I did fall asleep.

Okay. For the last like 10, 15 minutes. Because, at one point, your goal was just to rest. And if you fell asleep, you fell asleep. And if you didn't, you didn't. Right. But of course, my goal was, I forgot that was my goal, right? Winter sleep, winters sleep for 30 minutes, right? Oh yeah. Um, but as I was lying there before, I had the, I can't do this. This is an awful feeling.

When I was just initially laying there, I was like; this is kind of nice. And maybe I would do this every day. I could just rest for 30 minutes. Cause I do feel more, do I? Do you notice a difference? You seem perked up, but not. I feel more grounded, like I feel more energized, but I don't feel so crazy like I did before.

I was super hopped up before I went down before I laid down. I also think that I was very stressed about doing this experiment and having to take a nap. I was so dreading it.

About 10 minutes after I talked with Doug about my napping experience, I checked in with myself again. I actually am feeling surprisingly good, like, and I shouldn't be surprised, but I. I am like to the point where I think like this kind of just arrest of 30 minutes or 20 minutes every. In the middle of the day, really, I know it has its benefits, and I was not a believer of this, for me, was not a believer of this for me because I thought I needed to keep myself hopped up.

I don't know, it's really fascinating how much more calm I feel but energized at the same time. So maybe it's getting the creativity around when I do this rest. Again, all of this stuff is loosening up in my brain because I have it so rigid on this is what a nap looks like, and this is how you take a nap.

And being able to loosen that to be like, ah, maybe just resting your brain for 30 minutes in the middle of the day before you eat lunch might be a good idea if you think you need it. Cuz I only have ever napped. When I've been, you know, hungover or tired, like, or sick, that would be the only reason I would do it.

Um, not, uh, just today, like where I'm feeling fine and I just am napping, or resting. So it's going to rest my eyes. Okay. That's it. Okay. And now, weeks later, have I implemented, napping into my life? Well, honestly, But I have been taking more breaks to rest my head on my desk and close my eyes for a few minutes.

I've embraced two concepts that this experiment has shown me. Crawling into bed in the middle of the day is not something I'm going to do unless I'm sick, but I have found short, bite-sized respite periods beneficial. They give me more grounded energy and less hopped-up anxious energy. Even at the end of the day, when I do a five to 10-minute rest, I am more energized and calm than usual.

Maybe over time, I'll build up to 30 to 60 minutes, but for now, I feel the napping challenge was a huge success.

That's it for this week. In our next episode, we'll talk with author and podcaster. Katherine May, about a unique cyclical philosophy for approaching rest that she calls. Wintering. That's next time on The Happier Approach. The Happier Approach is produced by Nikki Stein and me, Nancy Jane Smith. Music provided by Pod five and Epidemic Sound for more episodes.

To get in touch or to learn more about quieting high-functioning anxiety, you can visit nancy jane smith.com and if you like the show, leave us a review. It actually helps us out a lot. Special thanks to Dr. Sara Mednick. For speaking with us today, you can learn more about Sara and buy her book. Take a Nap, Change Your life at saramednick.com.

That's S A R A M E D N I C k.com. The happier Approach will be back with another episode in two weeks. Take care until then.