Imagine a product that increases alertness, boosts creativity, reduces stress, improves perception, stamina, motor skills, and accuracy, enhances your sex life, helps you make better decisions, keeps you looking younger, aids in weight loss, reduces the risk of heart attack, elevates your mood, and strengthens memory. Now imagine that this product is nontoxic, has no dangerous side effects, and, best of all, is absolutely free.
This miracle drug is, in fact, nothing more than the nap: the right nap at the right time. The work of Sara C. Mednick, Ph.D., a researcher at the Salk Institute and the leading authority on the study of the nap, Take a Nap! Change Your Life. is the scientifically-based breakthrough program that shows how we can fight the fatigue epidemic-which afflicts an estimated 50 million Americans-through a custom-designed nap. Take a Nap! Change Your Life. explains the five stages of the sleep cycle, particularly Stage Two, Slow Wave Sleep, and REM, and the benefits each one provides; how to assess your tiredness and set up a personal sleep profile; and how to neutralize the voice in your head that tells you napping is a sign of laziness. (Not that anyone would have called JFK, Churchill, Einstein, or Napoleon a slug-a-bed.) Using the unique Nap Wheel on the cover and interior graphs and charts, it shows us exactly when our optimum napping time is, and exactly how long we should try to sleep-even how it's possible to design a nap to inspire creativity one day, and the next day design one to help us with our memory. There are tips on how to create the right nap environment, a 16-step technique for falling asleep, a six-week napping workbook, and more. Mark Ehrman is a freelance writer whose work appears regularly in The Los Angeles Times, Playboy, InStyle, and many other newspapers and magazines.
Sara Mednick, Ph.D., is a research scientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. She is a consultant for the military and private business, and her napping research has been covered by CNN, Reuters, NPR, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Real Simple, and Men's Journal. She has a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard and lives in San Diego. The new nap: not your grandfather's siesta
Imagine yourself in a perfect world. Your mood is positive. Your brain is operating at maximum efficiency. Your body feels healthy, energetic and agile. You have enough time to complete all the tasks at hand and still enjoy the company of family and friends. Every one of your goals is attainable.
In this wonderful land of your imagination, you enjoy a well-balanced diet, get enough exercise, breathe clean air and spend quality time with friends and family. What you aren't doing is walking around tired, right?
So ask yourself, "If I inhabited such a place, how much would I sleep?" Stumped? You're not alone. Most people don't get further than "a whole lot more than I'm sleeping now." After all, how do you remove the pressures of bills, job and relationships to create an oasis where you can even begin to envision what such a perfect world would involve?
Lucky for you, scientists have already resolved this issue. Our results back up what historians, anthropologists, artists and numerous brilliant leaders and thinkers have been telling their contemporaries throughout the ages. In a perfect world, all humans, including you, would nap.
It is written . . . in our DNA
Let's look at the rest of the animal kingdom. Do any other species try to get all their sleep in one long stretch? No. They're all multiphasic, meaning that they have many phases of sleep. Homo sapiens (our modern industrialized variety, anyway) stand alone in attempting to satisfy the need for sleep in one phase. And even that distinction is a relatively recent development. For most of our history, a rest during the day was considered as necessary a component of human existence as sleeping at n
