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I’ve been doing a little research on sleep. I
have found that the more I understand about nutrition, the better I eat,
and I thought the same would hold true for sleep. In fact, on my way to
convincing myself of the need to sleep more, I found mostly research to
help me sleep less. But first, here is the research that will make you
want to sleep: If you don’t sleep, you’re more likely to be
obese and dumb, both of which are bad for your career. People who get fewer than six hours of sleep function
like drunk people at work. For example, people who missed just one night of
sleep scored 20 percent lower on math tests than they did when they had
eight hours of sleep. And people who get significantly less than eight
hours a night of sleep are more likely to be obese, according to a study at
the University of British Columbia. Here’s some research I didn’t expect to
see: Human beings need only six or seven hours of sleep.
In fact, if you get more than that, you are likely to die earlier,
according to researchers from the University of California, San Diego.
And here’s more good news for the night owl who
suffers with a day job: If you miss out on sleep, you don’t need to
make it all up. Only about a third of this lost sleep needs to be regained.
The people who spend all weekend in bed catching up don’t need that
much sleep. They just like lying around in bed.
You don’t even have to wait for the weekend to
make up the sleeping time: Power naps are in fashion — at least among
elite athletes and soldiers in Iraq, both of whom are required to take
power naps before a major effort. The power nap should be exactly 20
minutes, according to sleep researcher Sara Mednick at the Salk Institute
for Biological Studies. Your sleep cycles run in 90- or 120-minute cycles,
but after 20 minutes you’ve done the most important part of your
sleeping.
I am an easy convert to the idea of a power nap, but I
never seem to wake up at that magical 20-minute mark when researchers say
that I won’t be groggy. I am, in fact, routinely groggy after my
supposed power nap. And that groggy feeling when you wake up is the
equivalent of you after four beers, according to Kenneth Wright at the
University of Colorado. So the power nap is not for me. But here’s my favorite study, the one that
really pulls everything together: the caffeine nap. This is a nap that
allows me to compensate for not quite getting my seven hours of sleep a
night, but I don’t feel groggy after the nap. Researchers at Loughborough University in England
found that coffee can clear your body of the sleep-inducing chemical
adenosine. The best way to handle the caffeine is to chug a cup of coffee
and then immediately take a nap before the caffeine kicks in and makes for
jittery napping. The nap should last exactly 15 minutes, which is the point
at which the caffeine starts to gain traction in your brain. I did it today, head on the table, next to the
computer, when I was sure that I could not keep my eyes open another second:
Fifteen minutes, and boom! I was writing again with perk and verve. Of course, the caffeine nap will save the world from
having to sleep. For one thing, there’s no research to show that
caffeine nap can help you beat the correlation between lack of sleep and
obesity. But I’ll tell you, I’ll never aim for eight hours of
sleep again.
Penelope Trunk has launched new businesses for
multinational corporations and founded two of her own companies.
Penelope’s forthcoming book is Brazen
Careerist: New Rules for Success (Warner
Books, May 2007).
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2007.
