Optimize your urban lifestyle with Power-naps

This might sound like a familiar scenario, you wake up in the morning realizing that you have to be at the office in a couple of hours. You rush through all your morning activities, and head for the office. Once you get to the office you do all your daily tasks, have meetings, appointments, and do you job. Afterwards once you finish all your duties, you might get to go somewhere after works, maybe dinner with friends, going to an exhibition, or maybe releasing all those tension at a club. Even if you chose to go straight home you find that you still have to do things for your family, or maybe you just need to watch your favorite show on TV or that ball game between AC Milan and Juventus. Another common twist to the scenario is that you bring your work home and work all night. While the next morning you have to wakeup and go through all the similar routines. Nowadays, the chance to get a 6-hour-sleep is a luxury for most people, but the urban lifestyle demands a fully active body, you just can’t afford losing concentration near the deadline, and falling asleep behind the wheel could be disastrous. One way to maintain your focus and performance is by power-napping.

In order to understand how power-napping works, we need to know about the stages of sleep. Well basically there are five stages of sleep, the first stage is the transition between wakefulness and sleep, and it usually lasts for 5 to 10 minutes. The second stage of sleep lasts for 20 minutes, when the brain begins to produce sleep spindles, or bursts of rapid rhythmic brainwave activity. The third stage is the transition between light sleep to very deep sleep. The fourth stage of sleep is deep sleep, where bed-wetting and sleepwalking occurs, this usually lasts for 30minutes. The fifth stage is Rapid-Eye-Movement sleep or REM, where dreams mostly occur. The body and brain’s need for recharge can be fulfilled in the first two stages of sleep, therefore powernaps lasts only for 20 to 30 minutes. Sleeping for more than 30 minutes without completing the sleep cycle would leave you feeling drowsy and disoriented; take care not to over sleep.

You can also use caffeine, as it takes about 20 minutes for caffeine to take effect. Have you caffeine just before taking your nap, and wake up feeling double energized. To take your nap, create a comfortable environment to sleep in, if possible darken the light and prepare a blanket. Explain to others about the importance of power-napping so that you won’t be disturbed. Train your body sleep for a short period of time, use and alarm or ask someone to wake you up. You can build a habit by maintaining a steady sleeping rhythm of long and short term sleep for 21 days; it generally takes that long to build a new habit.

Indira Prana Ning Dyah