The napping house

How to nap:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/naps/

The Mid-Afternoon Dip

I’ve been nibbling on an interested book about sleep for several months now (as in, it is on my night stand and I read a few pages periodically right before I…go to sleep). Incidentally, I don’t recommend that you think too much about sleep right before you try to do it. It's too much pressure!

The book is called Power Sleep and it is by the sleep researcher who coined the term “power nap”:

The author includes the following two diagrams on pages 48 & 49 that have thus far been my favorite insight from the book:

The second figure illustrates that at all times during the day we have two forces working on us: a “wakefulness” force and a “desire to sleep” force. In other words, at any point during the daytime if you lay down on your couch you could probably fall asleep.

The reason I thought the graph was so interesting is the fact that it shows a significant mid-afternoon dip in wakefulness. I thought I uniquely suffered from this condition – and suffer I do. Turns out it is common in our species.

You could basically set a clock by my profound desire to take a nap at exactly 3:00 PM. I am more tired at 3:00 PM than at any other time of day. I wish I could relocate my mid-afternoon tiredness to 10:30 PM.

Nature wants us to take a siesta!