Early last year, I mused on the benefit of a morning nap. While that still holds true, napping in the afternoon may be the difference between winning a race and coming in second.

For many people, as midafternoon sets in, so does the drowsiness. We push through, chasing more productivity goals at the workplace, but perhaps your body is onto something. It certainly isn’t suggesting that you should crush a Rockstar. That afternoon sleepiness may be key to your sleep cycles. From the Washington Post:

“Napping may help deal with the stress of daily living,” said Michael Twery, who directs the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute’s National Center on Sleep Disorders Research. “Another possibility is that it is part of the normal biological rhythm of daily living. The biological clock that drives sleep and wakefulness has two cycles each day, and one of them dips usually in the early afternoon. It’s possible that not engaging in napping for some people might disrupt these processes.”

A large scale study of 23,000 men linked afternoon napping with a 30% less likely chance of dying of heart disease. Yet even with the benefits of health, stress reduction, and better nighttime sleep, many of us think we don’t have time. Dr. Sara Mednick, in her book Take a Nap! Change Your Life, argues that an afternoon nap can increase productivity, creativity and restore sensory perception.

It is the benefits outside of an office where you may reap the most rewards for your nap, however. If you’re training for a competition or just pushing your fitness levels, a nap could improve your athletic performance. From the American Council on Exercise:

…sleep in general, and nap sleep in particular, help to consolidate memory, especially for newly acquired skills, which Czeisler said was proven in studies involving animals and mazes. “What happens is that certain brain cells fire when they hit certain points in the maze. We’ve found that the mice are rerunning the maze in their sleep and when they awaken, they can more quickly negotiate the maze. The animals were ‘practicing’ during sleep.”

We know unequivocally that our muscles repair themselves at rest, not during training. At my physical peak, I was in Lakeland, Florida, in spring training in 1998. I went to camp, trained hard, napped, ate dinner then went to bed. I didn’t know it then, but that nap may have been the most important part of the process. In addition to allowing my muscles to recover from my training, I was also inducing the release of growth hormone. From a pubmed.gov study:

 In order to determine whether sleep onset per se might precipitate the sleep growth hormone (GH) response, sleep EEG-EOG and plasma GH characteristics were studied in 15 healthy young males (AM) sleeping from 8 AM to 10 AM, when REM sleep is known to predominate, and in 14 subjects (PM) sleeping from 4 PM to 6 PM, when slow-wave sleep (SWS) predominates. PM subjects obtained significantly more SWS and less REM sleep than AM subjects. There was wide individual variability in the level and timing of the GH rise during the naps, but GH release was significantly greater during PM naps than during AM naps for the groups as a whole. The difference between conditions reflected primarily the fact that more subjects exhibited frank GH peaks during PM naps than during AM naps. These results indicate that the occurrence of the sleep GH response is not dependent upon sleep onset, and confirm previous reports of an association between the sleep GH response and SWS.

Sure, a study of 15 men is far from conclusive, but there is plenty of evidence that suggests napping as part of a recovery program is conducive to getting stronger.

I really can’t see any downside risk to taking an afternoon nap. Whether you’re a competitive athlete or pushing hard at the office, you should be hunting value at the margins. If the difference between winning and losing can be found in 45 minutes of shuteye, I can’t imagine what activity is worthy of standing in the way.

Off to never never land,

Kap