Have a look at this infographic and see if you can be persuaded to take a nap- it’s not just good for students!
Click image to view PDF or read below.
Do you think you can fit naps into your daily life? Let me know why/not!
Have a look at this infographic and see if you can be persuaded to take a nap- it’s not just good for students!
Click image to view PDF or read below.
Do you think you can fit naps into your daily life? Let me know why/not!
This article describes the two techniques of measuring when a person is asleep: actigraphy and polysomnography.
Polysomnography (PSG) monitors many body functions including brain (EEG), eye movements (EOG), muscle activity or skeletal muscle activation (EMG) and heart rhythm (ECG) during sleep. After the identification of the sleep disorder sleep apnea in the 1970s, the breathing functions respiratory airflow and respiratory effort indicators were added along with peripheral pulse oximetry.
Actigraphy is done by a portable device usually worn around the wrist or ankle that registers movement. Actigraphy is much less cumbersome and invasive, and therefore more suitable to naturalistic and long term experiments.
The present study aims to determine if actigraphy can detect accurately sleep in healthy, young adults during a 90-min mid-afternoon nap opportunity when compared to PSG.
Conclusion:
actigraphy was fairly proficient in distinguishing the difference between a nap and a no-nap period of quiet rest. Although actigraphy overestimated sleep during the no-nap condition, the accuracy values remained reasonably high
This paper is one of the proceeds of a symposium held by the authors (“The Effect of Naps on Health and Cognition”, held at the 5th Congress of the World Federation of Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine Societies in Cairns, Australia, September 2007). It describes several research questions and nap-hypotheses, and an agenda for further research on naps is proposed.
Practice points:
Research agenda:
Especially the second to last point is of interest to me. Would ‘younger children’ also include adolescents though?
An interesting article comparing three methods of reducing daytime sleepiness against a control group.
The setup was to test one countermeasure each week, in one test day a week, to see the effects of:
From the New York Times: Rethinking sleep by David K. Randall
Mr. Randall states that we only started believing in 8-solid-hours-sleep in Western society, and only after the industrial revolution. Perhaps midday naps were unpopular to factory owners? There are other unhealthy sleeping habits connected to the industrialized world: think of shift work and night jobs.
But even today, in many societies naps are a way of life. In Spain, although in decline, people take a siesta after lunch, the main meal of the day. In China and other Asian countries, taking a powernap at your desk makes you seem motivated and effective, not lazy.
Further in the article, texts from historical records like Shakespeare are cited as proof that daytime sleeping was once common.
A character in the “Canterbury Tales,” for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.” A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection. Continue reading
Following are links to literature I read on the topic of sleep, most recent on top. I will update this list as I go along, hopefully making this post a complete reference at the end of the semester (some articles are protected and can be read on the TU/e network only, sorry). As I go along, I will publish separate posts with reviews for each article and link to those as well. Continue reading