The benefits of taking a nap are so much that you can’t think of it.
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Editor’s note: Whether you want to take a nap is a controversial issue. Some companies will turn off the lights at noon, and all of them will take a nap, while some bosses think that taking a nap is like being lazy. Nowadays, more and more scientific research shows that taking a nap during the day is biologically significant. It can prevent diseases, help the brain to remember the ones to remember, forget to forget… The correct way is to develop a nap. Get used to, don’t do other things while you sleep. This article is translated from Medium, author Maya Kroth, originally titled “Why Napping Is Good for You, According to Scien”, I hope to inspire you.
Since the emergence of human civilization, the value of nap has been controversial. Plato believes that sleep is anti-social. He writes that “sleepers are as useless as dead people.” Rabbi (Jewish respect for learned people) is in Talmud, a classic of Judaism. I also discussed this topic and concluded that most people should avoid taking a nap. Commentators wrote: “A person’s sleep during the day must not exceed the horse’s sleep.” “How long is the horse’s sleep? 60 breaths, or about half an hour. In the Middle Ages, some doctors worried that a nap in the afternoon would cause fever and headache. , edema and gout, especially after a full meal.
Since then, science has made great progress, but research on sleep, especially on small baboons, is still scarce. However, the available evidence suggests that a nap is like a magical pill that not only makes you more awake, but also protects your heart, lowers blood pressure, improves memory, and enhances creativity. Sara Mednick, chief sleep researcher, points out in her book, Sleeping a Mind! Changing Life, that naps alleviate some of the most harmful effects of the suspicion, which means if we take a nap every day. Driving on the road will be safer, bank accounts will be more generous, sex life will be better, and our eye bags will not be so obvious.
The following are some of the most interesting discoveries about the nap in the scientific community.
Napping is biologically significant
University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) Neuroscience professor Matthew Walker wrote in his 2017 bestselling book Why We Sleep: “Everyone, regardless of cultural background or geographical location At around 3 pm, genetically, the alertness will drop.”
Today, most people in developed countries are single-phase sleep, that is to say People just sleep for a long time at night. But is this natural? To study this problem, anthropologists have observed pre-industrial societies, such as the sleep patterns of the San people in the Kalahari Desert, because their lifestyle has remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years. The researchers found that most of these tribes are in a two-phase sleep mode, which means sleeping 7 to 8 hours at night and 30 to 60 minutes in the afternoon, especially in hot weather. Nowadays, from the agricultural revolution, industrialization to the invention of light bulbs, various factors have broken the habit of sleeping twice a day. A report from the Centers for Disease Control in 2016 found that more than one-third of Americans sleep less than the recommended 7 to 9 hours a day today; data from the Sleep Council show that the situation in the UK is even more Worse, nearly three-quarters of people lack sleep.
Napping can prevent heart disease
In the 1990s, when Greece began to phase out naps and extended store hours during the day, researchers at Harvard University’s School of Public Health tried to quantify the impact of this cultural change. Walker wrote that the six-year study of more than 23,000 Greek adults was heartbreaking. Although at the beginning of the study, all participants did not have a history of heart disease or stroke, at the end of the six-year study, those who did not have a nap habit were 37% more likely to die of heart disease than those who normally had a nap habit. .
Walker said: “After giving up the traditional two-phase sleep, our life expectancy is shortened. In the small enclaves of Greece, such as Ikaria, the tradition of nap is still intact, and men live. The possibility of 90 years old is almost American maleFour times, this may not be surprising.
Napping can lower blood pressure
About half of Americans have high blood pressure, and in order to control high blood pressure, they spend more than $100 billion annually on drugs and other outpatient services. But the study, published this spring at the American College of Cardiology, found that simple naps may be as effective as some drugs in combating high blood pressure.
When people take low-dose high-pressure medications, the sphygmomanometer readings drop by an average of 5 to 7 mm Hg, compared to an average of 5 mm Hg after a short period of time. It is equivalent to eating less salt or drinking less.
The study’s author, the Greek cardiologist Manolis Kallistratos, said: “These findings are important because even if the blood pressure drops 2 mm Hg, the heart can be The risk of cardiovascular disease such as illness is reduced by 10%. According to our research, if a person can take a nap in luxury during the day, it is also good for high blood pressure.”
“The mechanism of nighttime sleep and daytime nap is different and has different effects on health.”
Napping can help you remember what you remember, forget what you forgot
Sleep helps the brain process information collected throughout the day and helps restore brain learning. To verify this, Walker and his colleagues asked the study participants to complete a short-term memory challenge at noon—matching 100 pairs of faces and names. Then, they let a group of people take a nap for 90 minutes and let another group play board games or go online. 18:00. There was another learning activity in both groups. In the second test, people who did not have a nap were much more difficult to learn new knowledge, 20% behind the nap group.
To find out why, the researchers analyzed brainwaves in the nap group. They found that every 100 to 200 milliseconds, their brains send a current from the hippocampus that store short-term memory to the cerebral cortex that preserves long-term memory. This is actually a process in which memory shifts from short-term memory to long-term memory, freeing up space in the hippocampus to learn more in the second phase of learning.
Then they designed another study to test whether the memory consolidation function of sleep can distinguish which facts need to be remembered and which Need to forget. They let the subjects learn a long list of words and tell them to remember some words and forget other words. Those who have nap remember the words they are told to remember and seem to avoid remembering others. The words, and the group that did not have a nap did not show any such differences.
Walker concludes: “Sleep does not fully and non-specifically preserve all the information you learn during the day. Instead, sleep can provide a more acute judgment in improving memory: what information is preferred? Need to strengthen memory, what information is not.”
Genes that may have a nap in the biosphere
In 2017, Spanish researchers studied the nap habits of 53 pairs of female twins to determine the effects of genetic factors on sleep rhythms, including naps. Participants wore a week’s activity monitor on their wrists (this is a more objective way to measure sleep than asking people to do a survey); about 60% of people sleep at least once a week for an average of 45 minutes.
These data suggest that people’s sleepiness after lunch and the subsequent nap needs may be affected by genetic factors, even after controlling for other factors, such as the sleep time of the night before the twins. Genes also affect when sleep falls, how long naps last, and the overall “robustness” of the sleep rhythm.
As with humans, the genes of the fruit fly also determine how long they take a nap during the day. This year, researchers at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers University have discovered a gene that prevents flies from snoring when the weather is cool. They call this gene ” Daywake”. Flies don’t like too hot environments, and naps can protect them from excessive exposure to hot conditions, but when it’s cold, the “daywake” gene keeps the flies awake so they can do something else.
Edrid is saying: “Although the daywake gene does not exist in humans, we have found that nighttime sleep and daytime nap are controlled by different mechanisms, which are different for health. The role.”
University of Tsukuba, Japan A 2018 study also explored genes for daytime sleepiness, this time in mice. The researchers found that an ammoniaThe base acid plays a crucial role in regulating the “sleep requirement”. By changing a gene, they can control the degree of sleepiness and the time of the mice. They believe that these findings may help explain the etiology of idiopathic narcolepsy. Idiopathic narcolepsy is a sleep disorder in which patients do not get enough sleep no matter how much they sleep or how many hours they sleep each night.
Don’t do other things while you are taking a nap
If you don’t take a nap during the low cycle of the physiological cycle, it can be terrible. In Daniel’s book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing describes countless scenes: in the afternoon, Danish students score lower on the test, and the judge is unlikely to Prisoners make favorable judgments, anesthesiologists are three times more likely to inject a lethal dose of anesthesia, and nurses are 10% less likely to wash their hands. Traffic accidents caused by lack of consciousness surge between 2 and 4 in the afternoon. . All this seems to tell us: take a nap.
Translator: Jane
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