Intro to Napping: Part 2

I always thought that some people were just awesome nappers and other people just couldn't handle it. Through reading Take a Nap and other stuff, I still think that's true, but I also think that napping takes practice, just like anything else.

As I mentioned in Intro to Napping: Part 1, I've had some rough napping experiences recently, although to be fair, any time when I am woken up by anything other than my own biological clock, I tend to want to kill something. (That first chime from my alarm in the morning is the single worst moment of my day. Or when my roommate's dog whines at 6 am when she leaves. That little bastard is lucky he can still walk.)

Anyway, it turns out that there is something of a science to napping, which, when taken into consideration, can help one avoid the negative effects of waking up feeling groggy and irritable.

Sara Mednick explains that the culprit here is Slow-Wave Sleep or SWS:

When you're fully awake, your brain is operating on many frequencies. but during SWS your entire brain rhythm has synchronized into a slow, uniform pattern. Sleep inertia is how we experience the lag that occurs while the brain once again recreates them multiple faster frequencies. The groggy feeling can become particularly acute for the sleep-deprived, since someone whose body has a greater need of SWS has a greater chance of waking up during SWS and thus into sleep inertia.

Now here comes the exciting part: By sleeping shorter or longer periods, you can avoid waking up in SWS and therefore avoid (for the most part) feeling like crap when you wake up! Yay!

The Boston Globe has a nice little napping "cheat sheet", if you will. It appears that The Guardian ripped it off here, and then Lifehacker posted it again here. Awkward.

This very blurry and small picture explains how to avoid waking up in SWS. Click to enlarge, por favor.
Bottom line: Your naps should be shorter than 45 minutes or longer than an hour and half in order to avoid SWS.

Also, Mednick says that even if you do feel a little fuzzy after a nap, you can quickly "fire up" your brain through physical activity, sensory stimulation such as splashing water on your face or a shot of espresso.

"In any case," Mednick explains, "having napped cannot make you 'more tired,' any more than a light snack makes a starving person 'more hungry.' If you experience sleep inertia (grogginess), you've simply whetted your body's appetite for a resource that your conscious mind has been trying to ignore."