Everyone has their own sleep rate. But in general, medical organizations believe that an adult needs to sleep 7-9 hours. Daytime sleep does not replace a full-fledged night, but for a while it will give a charge of vivacity. You can determine your level of drowsiness using the Epworth scale.
An interesting study has recently been published. It turned out that if a person has a normal night’s sleep, then an additional daytime sleep will not bring any benefit. But if a person does not sleep at night, then daytime sleep will do him good.
This is a very important conclusion. If you have severe drowsiness, you can sleep during the day for up to 30 minutes. Such a dream will positively affect performance and well-being.
Sleep is important for health. Due to lack of sleep, we feel tired and become irritable. Regular poor sleep leads to obesity, heart and kidney disease, diabetes and depression. Many companies – Google, Nike, Procter & Gamble and others – allow employees to doze off in the workplace. It has been proven that short daytime sleep improves cognitive function, as well as short-term memory and mood. Daytime sleep improves performance better than caffeine.
There are many scales for measuring drowsiness, but Epworth is the main one. We conducted a study at the Center for Sleep Medicine; more than 5,000 respondents from 331 settlements of the Russian Federation participated in it, mainly people aged 20 to 35 years.
We found increased drowsiness in 40.9% of respondents. The numbers impressed us. We have been tracking the dynamics for the fourth year, the percentage of people with increased drowsiness is growing.
For daytime sleep to be as effective as possible, you need to follow a few rules.
Here are the recommendations made by the medical journalist Daria Sargsyan in her book Killer Wallpapers, Poisonous Water and Seducing Chair:
- Sleep no more than 20-30 minutes. If you sleep longer, then after waking up it may be more difficult to recover.
- Create the same conditions that are necessary for a night’s sleep: darkness and silence.
- Sleep in the morning. So the usual regimen of sleep and wakefulness will not fail, in the evening it will be easier for you to fall asleep.
