Picture this: You’ve just come back from four classes, you’ve been up since the crack of dawn, and you are tired. You see your bed and it is calling your name.
What are you going to do? Are you going to give into temptation or are you going to do homework? You decide to sit on your bed and let yourself doze off, promising you’ll wake up in 30 minutes. You wake up three hours later, groggy and sweating and not even sure what year it is.
This is how I nap, and unfortunately, I wake up feeling worse than when I fell asleep. So how can I fix my own horrible habits and get in that perfect power nap? Moreover, how can we as college students perfect the art of napping?
The National Sleep Foundation recommends a short nap (20-30 minutes) for short-term alertness. So for us college students, that’s perfect. A quick power nap between classes or right before a midterm to wake us up and go on with the rest of our busy lives is ideal.
It can be difficult to figure out our schedules to accommodate naps with a midterm every other day, practice, two papers due; but they can be crucial. Do your best to give yourself a break. You will appreciate it!
Know you are going to be up all night doing work? Plan your naps ahead of time. Building naps into your schedule can help to make sure you don’t oversleep and are able to get all of your work done on time.
Don’t mistake napping for sleep; it is not the time to fall into a deep slumber for hours. A nap is meant to recharge your batteries in the short run.
When I wake up from naps, I experience sleep inertia, which is that groggy feeling you get after your nap has turned into actual sleep. I will be the first one to tell you that naps feel amazing while they are happening, but make sure you factor in how you will feel afterward when planning how long to lie down for. Try to keep it less than 90 minutes.
Naps have many other benefits as well. They help a ton psychologically, so next time someone tells you you’re just being lazy, you can fight back. Naps provide us with a mini-vacation — which is something I personally need most days.
But make sure you nap at the right time during the day. If you try to nap too early, you might not actually be tired enough to sleep. But if you nap too late, you might mess up your sleep schedule. I usually end up catching some Zs around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and that seems to work well when I am not actually sleeping until 2 in the morning.
Remember, you should feel better when you’re done napping. Don’t stick with a napping schedule that isn’t doing you any good! Napping can be a beautiful thing and very beneficial to your health, so next time you have 20 minutes of extra time, take a nap. You’ll be happy you did it.
