Take-a-nap’s Benefits

            Sometimes, people are too busy to do something and do not have time to rest. Particularly, they will find little spare time in their rush, mostly using it for rest. For example, someone is going to business trip by plane. While he is already on the plane, there is nothing to do and he needs to wait until the plane has landed. Therefore, he will take a rest for a while, about 15 minutes-1 hour. In the other hand, there will be some people who do not want to do it because they think it just wasting time. That happens because they do not know the benefits of taking a nap. For example, taking a nap will improve the cognitive function, creative thinking, and memory performance. It can even have physical benefit such decrease the risk of dying from heart disease. However, we will discuss three major things that really showing us the benefits just like memory performance, how it helps you learn and avoiding burnout.

            First of all is about memory performance. People who take a nap can memorizing something better than people who do not take a nap. According to some scientists, taking a nap after receiving any information may keep them preserved. In one study, the researcher asked two groups of people to memorize a set of cards. After that, one group having a nap and other was not for about 40 minutes. Then, they have to recall their memory by learning another set of cards. As the result, a group who had taken a nap did better than other group which did not take a nap. Seemingly, taking a nap helps their brains to memorize thing much better. In other side, brain which is keep working without any rest mat lead to light-dullness.

            Next is how taking a nap helps people learning. Taking a nap helps brain to restore the old information from people’s head. Therefore, it will be ready to receive new information easily. From US researcher, this one occurred after several stages of sleep. In a study, two groups of 39 adults were asked to do a challenging task and perform the result after receiving some information. They did the performance at midday, and the researcher found out that their performances were equal. At 2 p.m, one group took a nap for about 1, 5 hours while the other group stayed awake. Then at 6 p.m, both groups were asked to do another task and also perform it as well. As result, the nap-group performed much better than their performance on mid-day, and of course better than non-nap group. The researcher concluded that sleep/nap is needed in order to let brain clearer so that the new information could be absorbed more. Other researcher was also found that people who did not take a nap would not be able to absorb information by 100%, although they did, they would only receive 60% of the information.

            The last, taking a nap helps people to avoid burnout. Burnout is physical or mental collapse because of overload information. Besides that, burnout is also a signal that people cannot take any more information unless they got a chance for sleep. A study from Massachusetts explained that students’ performance during a test was depended on how long they were awake. At the first test, all of the students mostly did the test well. However in the next session of the test, some students especially who didn’t have taken a nap found that the test became more stressful, of course their test’s result was getting worse and worse than before. In other hands, students who had taken a nap at least for 1 hour long didn’t find any difficulties and did the next test very well. It can be concluded that brain which is full of information is no longer accepting any new information if it has not been rested yet. Another study also said that a 60-90 minutes nap has same quality with full-night’s sleep. It is much like the eyes and the brain are being fixed while people sleeping.

            In conclusion, take a nap or sleep in short time can improve mental operations, performance, reaction times and subjective feelings of alertness. And that improvement in performance and alertness seems to be maintained for up to two and sometimes three hours after the nap. Interestingly, the five minutes nap just did not produce the same amount of improvement while longer naps of 25-30 minutes led to subjects being somewhat drowsy and less alert for up to an hour after the nap (According to Professor Leon Lack from Flinders University).

By: Nanda Rani H.

Mid-term task