Should I drink coffee before I nap?

[rifat28dddd]

You don’t have to shell out $13,000 for an EnergyPod—a chair designed to facilitate workplace napping with music, vibrations, and usage tracking technology—but you shouldn’t neglect your nap environment.

Seek out a dark, cool space, ideally between 65 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit, with minimal noise and distractions. Considering packing earplugs and a sleep mask in your briefcase. The closer you can get to feeling like you’re in a cave, the better.

How long should I nap?
This is a bit of a trick question. The answer depends on what you want to get out of your nap. Looking for a burst of alertness, confidence, or to solidify some simple information in your memory?

Then a quick power nap (at least 10 and up to 20 minutes) may be your best bet. A power nap implies that you wake up before you enter slow-wave sleep, thereby lessening the risk of sleep inertia.

Looking for a deeper swell of creativity, or a sustained lift in those higher-order cognitive functions, like planning and reasoning?

Then you might want to block out a longer span of time for your nap, say, 40 minutes or more. At around an hour, you’re liable to enter REM sleep, which helps to bolster associative thinking and insight.

Longer naps also mean longer-lasting benefits. Research paraguay telegram data indicates that improvements in cognitive performance can last several hours if you commit to a nap more than 30 minutes long, whereas shorter naps yield benefits that fade after 1 to 3 hours.

But, there’s a trade-off: sleep inertia is more likely after one of the longer naps. Once you enter slow-wave sleep, the probability of sleep inertia rises with time.

Additionally, you shouldn’t fly too close to the proverbial sun: a full sleep cycle lasts around 90 minutes, and if you exceed that in your nap, you could disrupt that night’s sleep.

It sounds counterintuitive, but drinking coffee just before you nap can actually elevate napping benefits to a new level.

One study found that ingesting caffeine and taking a nap was the most effective tactic for decreasing subjective sleepiness and increasing performance on computer tasks—better than a nap followed by bright lights, a nap followed by face-washing, coffee by itself, or just the nap by itself!