Our friends at ABC radio Brisbane called our lab manager Phil for a quick chat recently. They called him at 5:30 in the morning to talk about early morning wake times and day time napping. The irony of a 5:30am call to talk about early mornings was not lost on Phil. He did talk to them about shifting sleep phases slightly (i.e. regularly getting up earlier) should ideally be offset with earlier bed times, noting that for children (especially teenagers) that their natural later bedtimes don’t match with a stagnant school start times and can cause chronic sleep restriction. However one upside from the COVID-19 restrictions may be that school students may now be getting an opportunity to sleep in a little more.
Phil went on to talk about the benefits of naps, and that shorter naps (10-20 mins) are helpful to avoid the deep stages of sleep where you can wake feeling tired and sleepy and even mentioned that people have ‘coffee naps’. The premise of coffee naps is that you quickly drink a coffee before the nap, and by the time the nap is finishing, the energy boost from the caffeine is starting to ramp up adding, to the boost from the nap. It was also noted that the restorative benefits of naps can occur even if you don’t technically get off to sleep and that it may be better to pull over and have a nap when driving tired than getting out and ‘stretching your legs’.
Despite covering a lot of content he kept talking, as Phil often does and spoke about how sleep changes as we age, with poorer quality and quantity of sleep as we age, along with earlier bed times and wake times. So with poorer quality and quantity of sleep as we age, it’s understandable that our nanna’s love to have naps in the afternoon.
Hopefully their listeners got some useful info from Phil.
You can find some of their programs here: https://www.abc.net.au/radio/brisbane/programs/breakfast/episodes/
