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- In a recent study, researchers said that a nap two or three times a week could be beneficial to your heart's health.
- Experts say that a daily nap can be a sign of insufficient nighttime sleep or an underlying health problem.
- An expert says that naps should last less than 30 minutes or more than 90 minutes.
Taking a nap in the afternoon could be the dream of most working adults and parents who force their younger ones to fall asleep, hoping to do it themselves.
But while young children need to spend the majority of their day sleeping, sleeping in the middle of the day as we get older may not be as benign as it is there. seems.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends neonates sleep up to 16 hours a day, including naps, but they stop including them in the total sleep time of children as young as 6 years old. Teenagers should sleep between 8 and 10 hours a night.
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Getting this every night as an adult seems more like a pipe dream than a realizable goal. We often suffer from it later, relying on caffeinated beverages to help us live our day, while we prefer to find a quiet place in the office to doze for a minute.
From "I close my eyes" to crash long enough for you to wake up wondering what time and day it is, naps are surprisingly controversial in the medical community.
For starters, the need for a nap could signal more serious health issues. Among other things, it may mean that you do not sleep enough at night. It can also be a symptom of dementia in the elderly.
A new study released last week suggests that sleep is another thing we need with a balance similar to that of Goldilocks, and napping a few times a week to catch up could help avoid incidents related to cardiovascular diseases, such as a heart attack.
Any health professional will quickly explain the importance of good sleep every day.
Our body and mind are set to need to be put off about one-third of their existence. Not doing so is closely linked to many health problems, both mental and physical.
Sleep helps us recover from stress and gives our vital organs time to rest. That is why not getting enough sleep can have a cascade of adverse effects.
For example, previous research has shown that people with a genetic predisposition to heart disease can reduce these risks by getting enough sleep. However, having too much or too little sleep can expose people to the risk of heart attack.
Why and how is it?
Quite frankly, researchers still do not know how napping plays into our health.
Nevertheless, health professionals claim to have simple basic rules to close their eyes while the sun is still up.
Yue Leng and Kristine Yaffe, professors of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, recently published an article in BMJ's Heart that explains that researchers have even more questions than answers about napping.
The biggest challenge, they wrote, is how to define and measure these rest periods.
"Are they planned or unplanned? What is the purpose of naps? Are they taken occasionally when necessary or usually as a cultural practice? Are they taken to compensate for inadequate or insufficient nighttime sleep, or do they indicate poor underlying health? "Wrote Leng and Yaffe.
They also wonder if a "drowsiness" of 5 minutes counts for a nap.
"Until we get answers to some of these questions, the implications of napping can not be fully addressed," they wrote.
Their comments followed the study published last week.
In this study, researchers from the Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland used data from 3,462 people with no history of cardiovascular disease enrolled in a Swiss population study.
They looked at how often and how long participants took a nap a week and in which state their heart was later.
Over the next 5 years, researchers identified 155 fatal and non-fatal heart-related medical events among these participants.
They found a significantly lower risk of these events in people who napped once or twice a week compared to people who did not nap at all. This even represented people with sleep apnea or excessively sleepy during the day.
The researchers showed that they found no association between the duration of these naps and the medical events related to the heart.
Their research is based on a 2015 meta-analysis published by the Sleep Research Society.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan – a culture in which napping at work is seen as a sign of hard work – found that 11 studies showing that naps and heart health seemed to follow a curve-shaped J. This means that the risks decrease at a certain point but then increase later.
The researchers said that naps of less than 30 minutes – commonly referred to as "energetic naps" – were helpful in preventing coronary heart disease, but that they seemed to have an opposite effect if people slept longer.
This does not mean that naps are bad for your heart. On the contrary, their need could mean that something else is happening.
The study shows a correlation – meaning that things happen together – and not a causality.
Noting that it was premature to decide whether the nap was appropriate for maintaining optimal heart health, Leng and Yaffe wrote that the research "reassured that the answer was probably more than a simple" yes "or" no " And that we had a lot more to learn to nap. "
Dr. Anil Rama is Medical Director and Founder of the Kaiser Permanente Tertiary Sleep Medicine Laboratory. He is also an adjunct professor at the Center for Sleep Science and Medicine at Stanford University, California, and author of the new book "Shut Up and Sleep."
Rama told Healthline that one of the keys to the problem was whether a person's nocturnal sleep was healthy and free from activities such as awakening, waking, breathing and other problems that prevented a person to truly rest, rather than stay in bed.
"In my opinion, the question of whether the nap is healthy or not in terms of duration or frequency is not relevant," Rama said. "The relevant question: Is sleep healthy? If this is the case, one might think that the nap should be healthy.
Dr. Sujay Kansagra, sleeping health expert at the Mattress Firm mattress chain and associate professor at the Duke University Medical Center in Northern California, said the new study on napping frequency and cardiovascular disease was interesting.
"[However]like a lot of great studies, it ends up creating more questions than answers, "Kansagra told Healthline.
These include whether it is the nap that helps the heart or if it is because those who have the opportunity to nap have less stress.
"We know that sleep is essential to maintaining overall health. Sleep is a time when your blood pressure and heart rate tend to be lower than when you are awake. [it’s] probably play a role in restoring the heart, "said Kansagra.
He says that as long as a person does not have insomnia problems, there is nothing wrong with napping. He recommends that people take a nap between 20 and 30 minutes or extend the nap to 90 minutes.
"Waking up between these times can be grogging as the body enters the deepest phases of sleep during this time," he said. "The nap will always be good, but you may not feel so good when you wake up."
Nate Masterson, head of natural product development at Maple Holistics, explains that an important part of the new research is to recognize that the biggest challenge in measuring the health effects of naps is to determine the reason under -causes naps themselves.
"If you sleep long enough and good quality during the night, you should not need to take a nap during the day," he told Healthline. "Having said that, it's important to meet your body's needs, and withstanding fatigue can have detrimental effects on many bodily functions, including your cardiovascular health."
Basically, if you are tired and have time, a nap is not the worst thing for you. But you must not ignore the reason why you are so tired.
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