Everyone’s Talking About Napping – Here Are Six Reasons Why

We could all use more sleep, and there’s a reason Carte Blanche recently labelled us ‘the sleepless generation’ . One of the highlights of the weekend, if you manage to clear your schedule, is the Sunday couch nap. Couch naps are different from bed naps. They happen spontaneously, last the perfect amount of time, and there’s something about them that just hits the spot. Also, if you’ve found that you’re an all-round better person on days when you’ve managed to get a nap in, there might be something to that, according to a new study from researchers at the Asklepieion General Hospital in Greece. The Telegraph reports that the study looked at the sleeping habits of 212 people and found that those who took a nap in the afternoon experienced a fall in blood pressure. The study prompts the fascinating theory that people who live in southern Mediterranean countries, where siestas are commonplace, have a longer life expectancy not because of their diet but because of their habit of sleeping in the middle of the day. On which note, Japan proves an interesting case study, because the country with the world’s longest life expectancy also regularly features at the bottom of world sleep tables: the Japanese get an average of just 6 hours and 35 minutes a night. However, Japan is also known for its culture of napping – especially at work, where the practice even has its own name: inemuri. Evidence seems to suggest that an afternoon nap is a good thing, and here are six reasons to put your head down on your desk immediately: Napping Keeps You Focused Both Margaret Thatcher and Sir Winston Churchill slept just four hours a night but insisted on daily naps. In addition, the great Albert Einstein also found that regular […]

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