When it comes to the topic of napping most of us will agree that taking a nap feels good. According to Sara Mednick, Ph.D. talking a nap will actually make you smarter. In her book, Take a Nap! Change your life. Mednick maintains that napping has a number of scientifically proven benefits. They are:
- Increasing your alertness. This is an important factor for many people for example astronauts, stock-car drivers, bus drivers, telemarketers, healthcare workers and others interacting with public. NASA space studies have demonstrated that alertness increases by as much as 100% after a nap.
- Improving your accuracy. Making mistakes costs us time, money, and energy. Making a mistake can sometimes destroy people’s lives. While working with greater speed usually causes more errors, napping offers a valuable exception. So whether you throw pitches or darts, play chess or checkers, cut grass or precious stones, a nap helps you get it right.
- Helping you better decisions. Where are you going to eat dinner? Should you propose today or wait a while. What car should you buy? Should you sell your car? Every second, every minute, every day, we make decisions both trivial and small. Research indicates that pilots who took a nap in the cockpit made fewer judgment errors on take-off and landings and those who did not.
- Improving your perception. We depend upon our eyes, our ears and, to a lesser extent taste, touch and smell to live a successful life. Science has demonstrated that we can enhance our driving, cooking, appreciating art forms, reading, quality control and even bird-watching after a nap.
- Boosts your creativity. Many of history’s great artists and inventors, for example Mozart and Einstein, have said that napping allows the brain to create associations necessary for creative insight and opens the way for new ideas.
- Helps your memory. Our memory consolidation, bringing information together to form knowledge, cannot occur in any significant way without sleep. We can improve everything from learning a new programming language to remembering human anatomy by taking a short nap between study periods.
Mednick’s book demonstrates that taking a nap has many selling points. It also helps you plan the optimum nap: when to take it, how long to sleep, and how not to wake up groggy. Taking a nap is a way to improve many of the thinking abilities that make you smarter.
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