Afternoon Naps

It’s likely a rare occurrence that you wake up feeling completely refreshed, without any temptation to hit that snooze button. You know that not getting enough sleep is harmful to your health, but that knowledge isn’t going to just magically knock you out at the optimal time every night. Well, a study suggests that the way to reverse the damaging health effects of a poor night’s sleep are brief daytime naps. Researchers (Universite Paris Descartes-Sorbonne Paris Cite) found that naps seemed to restore hormones and proteins involved in stress and immune function to normal levels..…During the study men were limited to two hours of sleep for one night. The next day, they had a 2½-fold increase in levels of a stress hormone that increases heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar. They also had lower levels of a protein with antiviral properties. The next day, after another night with just two hours of sleep, the men were able to take two, 30-minute naps the day after. The researchers found that the men’s stress hormone and antiviral proteins went back to normal after napping.