How and why you should take a nap (every day)

Tobias Sjösten

By Tobias Sjösten on 25 Feb, 2016

A CrossFit L1 Trainer, BJJ practitioner, strength aficionado, and vegan. Building muscles without eating them!

When I recently moved to Barcelona I thought I’d found the perfect excuse to engage more in one of my favorite past-time hobbies – taking siestas. Turns out I was wrong, but there’s hope!

Apparently siestas aren’t that popular in Spain anymore. 😞

So I turned to science for help and searched for studies on sleep. It’s still a surprisingly new field of research but at least some things are agreed on and there are a lot of interesting results to dissect.

How and why you should take a nap (every day)

Downsides of sleep loss

Sleeping too little has quite negative effects on your cognitive abilities1.

It’s incredibly common that people are sleep deprived. One study estimated that it’d cost a whopping $20 billion (!) to test and treat everyone who has sleep apnea in the US4.

Benefits of sleep




Those are great results! Especially considering they didn’t actually do anything but stay in bed.

How sleep works


So what do we do? Let’s first have a look at why we sleep in the first place.

As I initially said, it’s still a new field and there’s a lot we still don’t know. As far as we know today though, there seems to be two processes controlling your sleep.

One is the sleep-wake homeostasis, which starts as soon as you wake up6. As your body uses energy it’s broken down to adenosine, which makes you increasingly sleepy7. When you fall asleep your body clears this up and you begin anew when waking up again.

The other process is the circadian rhythm, which basically is a fancy word for your built-in 24-hour biological clock. Using light and temperature your body knows when it’s time to sleep and when you should be awake.


Benefits of napping

Even if we can’t get the ten hours of sleep during night, we have options.


If dying less isn’t enough to convince you, napping also ups your mental game.


How to nap

In a day we often feel the most sleepy just after noon. That’s partly due to the food we just ate for lunch but also because of the build-up of adenosine, in the sleep-wake homeostasis process.


Just before this is the ultimate time to have a little eye-shut14 15!

Find a dark, quiet room, set the alarm for about 25 minutes16, and go to sleep. It’s still good even if you can’t actually fall asleep. Keep at it as often as you can and you’ll become better at it15.

Remember to set the alarm though and don’t sleep more than half an hour, as it’ll take you much longer to wake up and feel the benefits of the nap.

In fact, frequently napping for more than an hour has been associated with some negative drawbacks17 18, although no causation has been found.

Nap hack

Let’s finish off with a little hack.






You snooze, you win!

  1. Functional and Economic Impact of Sleep Loss and Sleep-Related Disorders  2 3





  6. Sleep homeostasis and models of sleep regulation. 

  7. Adenosine and Sleep  2





  12. Daytime naps improve motor imagery learning. 



  15. The effects of napping on cognitive functioning.  2




  19. Caffeine and adenosine.