What if there was an anti-aging therapy that would sharpen your memory, improve your mood, reduce stress, and even protect your heart in just 20 minutes – and do it for free – would you be interested? No problem! Take a nap.
Most over-50s are fairly defensive about naps, which we tend to associate with either the very young or the very old. But in terms of effective anti-aging therapies, napping is hard to beat. There is solid scientific evidence that a brief period of mid-day sleep can provide a whole host of anti-aging benefits, ranging from enhanced cognitive function to decreased risk of cardiovascular disease.
Though we tend to see sleep time as limited to the overnight period, in reality we’re programmed to also enjoy a brief sleep during the day. We often write off that drowsy feeling we experience in the afternoon to a large lunch, or to having slept poorly the night before, but it’s actually a natural physiological reaction that happens whether we’ve eaten or not, or whether we slept well or poorly during the previous night. It’s simply a fact of physiology: sometime between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. most people experience a period of drowsiness, characterized by diminished alertness, memory, coordination, and mood.
The perfect antidote to this natural low is a nap. A brief afternoon sleep has been shown to significantly improve alertness, mood, and cognitive function for the remainder of the day, and it also reduces the stress that can lead to heart disease, diabetes, and perhaps even unwanted weight gain.
The key to turning a few minutes of shut-eye into an effective anti-aging tool is to nap efficiently.
- Plan your nap. Set aside a half-hour during which you won’t be taking calls, etc.
- Find a private spot. Worrying about being interrupted can make drifting off very difficult.
- Lie down if possible. Falling asleep sitting up is possible, but it generally takes much longer.
- Darken the room if possible; bright light has a tendency to keep us alert.
- Set an alarm. Science has divided sleep into five separate stages of increasing depth, and a good refreshing 20-30 minute nap takes us only into stage two, or light sleep. If your nap goes much longer than a half hour you are likely to enter deeper stages of sleep, which can leave you feeling tired and groggy when you awake.
