Research Hit: Sorry, Naps Can’t Compensate for Sleep Deprivation
A good old after lunch nap, or siesta, or power nap, has been reported to work wonders. So much so that it is a surprise that many business don’t make it compulsory — a little like at Kindergarten!
However, some research, hot off the presses, by Michelle Stepan of Michigan State University, has shed some new light onto what a nap can and can’t do. And it is sobering.
The research was done on 275 college-aged participants and they were first given a bunch of cognitive tests then randomly assigned to one of three conditions:
Normal sleep at home,
Short nap of 30 or 60 mins in the lab
No sleep
Then the morning after they repeated the cognitive tests.
So what were the results?
Well, as expected, and as we know, sleep deprivation severely impaired cognitive ability. That is old news. But the naps did little to mitigate this. This was more of a surprise. Though this may sound negative, it is negative, the more refined view is that of slow wave sleep.
Deep sleep is characterised by slow brain waves, and it is this sleep that is the most beneficial and where most recovery occurs. In fact, in the napping condition how much slow wave sleep the participants got correlated to less reduction in performance. Each 10 minutes of slow wave sleep reduced cognitive impairment of sleep deprivation by 4%.
A caveat to note is that this was severe sleep derivation of going a full night without sleep. I wonder how this would work with deprivation of shorter periods, say getting five hours sleep, and combined with a nap?
We do know naps during the day can increase attention and cognitive ability — but if the sleep deprivation is too large this can’t compensate.
So, the moral is make sure you get your zzzzs!
…and I’m still sticking to my post lunch snooze…