The benefits of midday sleep are known not only from numerous publications in medical journals and popular publications. An afternoon nap, or siesta, is a wonderful tradition in hot climates. Yes, and our ancestors in the old days said: “Why is the Cossack smooth and well-knit? Because he ate, and on his side."
There are two reasons why you shouldn't give a damn about your vacation. Firstly, a slept person is ready to move mountains, shovel a lot of things, learn or master something new, because his brain is in good shape. Secondly, a person spends a third of his life on sleep. If you imagine that the rest of the third goes to work, and the remainder for loved ones and family, then there will be practically no beloved left.
How to deal with this? Elementary. They say that Leonardo da Vinci already used the polyphasic sleep technique. The genius of the Renaissance, after every four hours of wakefulness, liked to lie down and sleep for twenty minutes. He could sleep no more than two hours a day. By the way, Leonardo was not alone.
A similar method (it is called differently: polyphasic, biphasic and even philistine) was practiced not only by scientists - for example, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla - but also by politicians and powerful of this world: Napoleon Bonaparte, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton. Composer Brahms, composing his famous "Lullaby", dozed over a musical instrument. Winston Churchill was careful to ensure that government meetings did not coincide with his short afternoon break during World War II.
A monophasic cycle means that a person goes to bed from evening to morning. In a word, as the majority does. The duration of such sleep ranges from seven to ten hours a day. The biphasic cycle consists of two phases: the first one takes five to six hours to sleep, and the second is sleep, which takes 20 to 90 minutes. The total sleep time is from five and a half to ten hours a day. The common sleep cycle consists of one long sleep phase, which takes about three and a half hours, and three short phases of 20 minutes each day. This cycle is specially designed for our biorhythms. You can't sleep early in the morning, say, from three to six o'clock, because at this time the sleep depends on the characteristics of the circadian biorhythm and is not very deep.
Earlier this year, the University of California, Berkeley published the results of its new study, which suggests that one hour of sleep is enough to maximize and improve brain activity. Incidentally, the same study reported that students who pored over textbooks all night before exams had an almost 40 percent drop in memorization. This is due to the fact that with a lack of sleep in the brain, some areas are turned off.
The human body needs rest in order to unload short-term memory during sleep and clear space for new information. In a way, this can be compared to tidying up email, when you free it from unnecessary emails and spam. The information is processed in the hippocampus, which acts as a short-term memory, and then it is stored in memory.
So what should an ideal afternoon nap be like? Ideally, it is best to take a short nap in the afternoon, eight hours after waking up in the morning. Doctors do not recommend going to bed after three o'clock in the afternoon, since a person, in this case, has difficulty falling asleep in the evening, except if he is really used to going to bed early. It is necessary to go to the side for half an hour, since it will take about ten minutes to be in the arms of Morpheus. When a person falls asleep in less than ten minutes, it means he does not get enough sleep and suffers from a lack of sleep. And most importantly, if you are not Napoleon or Stirlitz, who could wake up at the right time for them according to their "internal clock", then you should definitely set an alarm clock.
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The most elementary advice: you need to go to bed so that it is comfortable and warm. Not the best way is to take a nap in a chair. It would be best to put out the light or draw up the curtains, put on a special sleep mask. And so that you are not embarrassed that you have to go to bed in broad daylight, when there are so many things to do, remember the greats and what they managed to do in their life. Just because they loved the afternoon nap.