Micro-Napping
Part I Setting the Table, er...actually the Sofa
During the past year, in a most focused manner, I’ve experimented with shorter and shorter napping periods to assess impact, including benefits and side effects.
As my overall schedule includes only two main fixed pillars of attending services in the synagogue in the morning and in the evening, the time in between is wide open for exercise, sleep health coaching appts, reading, research, baking 100% whole grain rye bread, learning, and talking with friends and family.
Often, intervals of less activity and more relaxed schedules emerge, during which sleepiness creeps in. The most common times are 4 to 5 hours after awakening at 7 to 7:30 am or so (~noon) or later in the day around 4 to 6 pm.
Most such episodes of sleepiness are minor in that if I needed to get in a car to run an errand or field an important phone call, the drowsiness would all but disappear.
In a more relaxed moment, where an image forms in my mind’s eye of napping on the sofa, usually with two doggies, my next step typically yields one of three results. First, and the one I find most satisfying is a long walk, sometimes brisk, but regardless of speed at least an hour or longer. Rarely, would any sleepiness re-emerge afterwards.
The next most common and sometimes in tandem with exercise involves ingesting white or green tea, ranging in dose from 15 to 45 mg of caffeine. This experience is also rewarding as it successfully erases drowsiness 80% of the time, and then I return to other activities with more energy and motivation.
The third option is the micro-nap, where I am persuaded a short nap could change the drowsy, groggy, or foggy feeling developing in my mind, so I believe it’s worth my time and effort to nod off temporarily.
In the scenarios described above, my experiment was designed to determine: 1) how quickly could I achieve sleep; 2) what system would awaken me most efficiently, alarm, sleep breathing event, my dogs barking at UPS, or no discernible reason. Obviously for experimentation, I used an alarm many times to determine the character of shorter vs longer naps, and then how to gauge the quality of nap by assessing how I functioned afterwards.
Next up, duration of micro-naps and more.
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