#07: Naps

Naps as short as 26 minutes offered a 34% improvement in task performance and more than a 50% increase in overall alertness.

If you are struggling with sleep at night, do not nap during the day. Instead, stay awake across the day and build up as much of that healthy sleep pressure as possible to set yourself up for the best chance of both falling asleep and staying asleep.

In the small island of Ikaria in Greece where siesta naps have remained to this day, men are nearly four times as likely to reach the age of 90-years-old relative to their American male counterparts.

It's best to aim for a nap of usually less than 20 minutes. And the reason I say that is, otherwise, you can start to plunge deeper into your sleep cycle ... And when you awake, if you sleep longer, you can have what we call a 'sleep inertia'—it's almost like a little short sleep hangover where you feel worse rather than better...

In the middle of the afternoon, we can experience this beautiful biologically pre-programmed drop in our alertness as if we should be asleep for a short period of time during the afternoon.