Adults feel a little guilty about taking afternoon naps and some feel like a nap may affect them sleeping at night but new research gives a thumbs up for a catnap before dinner.<\/p>\n
In fact, medical officials say it improves health.<\/p>\n
A mid-afternoon snooze can boost productivity, improve your mood, help your memory, reduce stress and even make you more alert.<\/p>\n
Here are some details on the benefits.<\/p>\n
Naps reduce stress and that leads to better immune health, according to doctors.<\/p>\n
Stress is a leading factor in contributing to a number of diseases and lowering your defenses to fight disease.<\/p>\n
Naps are a great defense against that.<\/p>\n
Studies show that napping between 45 to 60 minutes a day lowers blood pressure after someone has a
\nmental stress.<\/p>\n
Naps are a type of repair action for your body after it goes through a stressful or traumatic situation and helps your body heal.<\/p>\n
The best creativity comes when you are in REM sleep.<\/p>\n
Normally that comes after you are asleep between 70 and 90 minutes.<\/p>\n
However, if you can fall asleep and get to the REM phase quickly, a nap can greatly improve your overall creativity.<\/p>\n
Most would think an afternoon nap would negatively impact your nighttime sleeping pattern but research shows it’s a good practice to help older adults sleep better at night.<\/p>\n
The best use of a nap is to take a 30-minute nap between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. and do moderate exercise after dinner to produce good nighttime sleep.<\/p>\n
Naps are a good practice for most adults as long as you don\u2019t oversleep.<\/p>\n
Doctors suggest to keep your naps to 30 to 60 minutes to avoid the after-nap drag.<\/p>\n
Be sure to keep up with a good diet and exercise to keep you energized afterward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Adults feel a little guilty about taking afternoon naps and some feel like a nap may affect them sleeping at night but new research gives a thumbs up for a catnap before dinner. In fact, medical officials say it improves health. A mid-afternoon snooze can boost productivity, improve your mood, help your memory, reduce stress […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17958,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[692],"tags":[1264,1617],"class_list":["post-17906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleep","tag-better-sleep","tag-naps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}