A Nap Meditation Will Make You Less Stressed In The Afternoon (in under 30 minutes)

So you’re torn. You like the idea of a nap but you’re busy in the afternoons. On the one hand, you like the idea of catching up on sleep, but on the other hand, you feel guilty about it.

Chris Martin from Coldplay revealed in 2021 that he naps and meditates to keep stress away. He described it as “almost like a little island, like a desert island in a sea of confusion.”

What a beautiful way to describe taking 15 minutes to lie down in the afternoon with your eyes closed

Benefits of an afternoon nap

We naturally feel a lull in the afternoon, following lunchtime. So taking a 10-20 minute nap or a longer 90 minute nap works with your body’s natural energy, instead of pushing through. This period of daytime circadian sleepiness occurs between 1-4pm and is often referred to as the post-lunch dip.

Would you like to see how taking an afternoon nap might be of benefit to your wellness and stress relief?

Naps may improve mood

You might like to think you’ve left your teenage ‘moody’ years behind you. But have you ever been frazzled in the afternoon and by 2pm being nice to everyone is a bit of a stretch? Naps might improve your mood.

When someone is chronically stressed or anxious, they become ‘hypervigilant’ for dangers in their environment. One of the danger signals they are particularly wary of is the facial expression of another person. So, Gujar et al., (2011) used the reactions to another person’s facial expressions to measure emotional stability.

In their study, participants who were assigned to the napping group, showed a lower rating of emotions towards fearful facial expressions and angry expressions compared to the no-nap group. These reduced reactions towards negative emotions and facial expressions may provide evidence for naps helping reduce hypervigilance amongst those who feel anxious.

There was also a significant increase in ratings of seeing a happy face after a nap. In their study, participants, showed better emotional stability after a nap compared to those who did not have a nap. Whereas as those who didn’t have a nap were highly sensitive to other people’s negative emotions. So a brief nap is a helpful way to recalibrate your reactions to other people’s emotions.

Zhou et al., 2017 also found a small improvement in mood after a nap but concluded it was too small to start recommending afternoon naps to improve a negative mood.

Naps improve self-efficacy particularly about goals

Self-efficacy refers to the belief you have in yourself. In a small study presented by Horne et al., (2019) they demonstrated that taking a short mid-day nap improved general self-efficacy and vigor. Meaning that taking a power nap might provide you with the resources and self-belief needed to attain your goals.

So when you feel as if you are not achieving your goals, don’t try harder. Instead, try resting your brain with a nap and you may wake up even more determined and confident.

Improved memory and learning

Slow-wave sleep, the deep sleep you experience in the last quarter of the night, is a time when you consolidate the learning you’ve done through the day. Without deep sleep you wouldn’t be able to store memories and recall them later.

But naps don’t include deep sleep, so can they still improve your memory and learning?

According to many studies, the answer is yes. A short nap of 45 minutes is good for improving procedural memory, the long-term memories of how to do certain actions such as typing, driving or cooking a new meal.

Daytime ‘power naps’ create a faster consolidation of learning and better motor memories.

Another study looking at students cramming for exams, found that taking a 1 hour nap after learning was better than remaining awake and taking a break. And the effects of the learning after a nap were still present when tested on the material a week later compared to when they crammed.

So if you’re looking for a way to help your brain learn and retain information more effectively, adding a short nap to your daytime routine could be better than pushing through.

“What’s amazing is that in a 90-minute nap, you can get the same [learning] benefits as an eight-hour sleep period,” – Sara Mednick, PhD, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside (American Psychological Society).

Stress management

Many organizations require their employees to work on shifts. This can cause a lot of stress for the person and that stress can produce adverse health effects. But can naps reduce the stress?

One small study in Japan, looked at nurses and measured the effects of taking two 15 minute naps during their 8-hour night shift. They measured the effects on fatigue, stress and how sleepy they felt.

Having a nap did not produce a significant reduction in how tired they felt but it did have an effect on reducing their stress levels. However, the stress reduction may have come from simply stepping away from work for a few minutes, rather than from the nap.

Sleep deprivation causes stress, but can that stress be ameliorated by a nap? In 2015 a study by Faraut et al., investigated stress measured by neuroendocrine and immune biomarkers. After a night of sleep restricted to only 2 hours, participants were either recruited to a no-nap condition or a 30-minute morning and afternoon naps. An increase in norepinephrine (stress hormone) was no longer seen in those participants who had taken a nap. They concluded that napping has the potential to counteract the detrimental health effects from stress hormones of losing sleep at night.

Sleep-pain link

My personal experience with napping is that I don’t do it very often. But if I have a headache, an afternoon nap normally shifts it better than anything else.

When you experience a night of disturbed sleep, you will be more sensitive to pain the following day. In 2015, a study by Faraut et al., showed that napping reversed increased pain sensitivity due to sleep restriction. When you’re at home, rather than a research laboratory, it could mean a nap could reduce hypersensitivity to pain, particularly if it’s due to a poor night‘s sleep.

If you like this blog post, pop on over to this other blog post called Are You Stressed About Not Sleeping?