I’ve been known to tease my wife a bit about her love of naps. The funny thing is though that I used to take hard-core naps all the time. These days however, I only get in a 10-min nap once every month or so, usually only whenever I’m strangely are particularly tired. I almost always just push on through my day looking forward to a good nights sleep at days end. My wife on the other hand has always told me that she’d rather sleep through the times of her day when she gets sluggish. Of course she inevitably annoys herself by not getting things done because the day flew by… you can see where the teasing becomes easy and tempting.
Of course today I’d like to share with you a finding that puts me and my kind in our places. It looks like my wife was on to something all along, and it’s not even hard to guess why. A study not too long ago as reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that 30-min naps in the middle of the day can decrease your risk profile for lethal heart disease (the number one killer in America). The study tracked 23,681 people over 6.3 years and generally concluded that three naps a week were effective at lowering your risk of dying from heart disease by 37 percent. Fairly significant if you ask me and in my opinion obviously tied to stress relief and the restorative nature of sleep itself. Maybe I should reinstitute them into my life and feel the wrath of the Mrs.
An Interesting Observation: In an older post I highlighted findings which showed that RLS could be a warnings sign for heart disease; considering this finding on naps, maybe the reason behind the increased risk of RLS sufferers is due to the lack of stress relief. Maybe the RLS keeps stress levels elevated as opposed to relieving them… just maybe. Do you have any thoughts? Let us all know in the comments below.
Source
Archives of Internal Medicine, Feb. 12, 2007
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