I’m a big napper. World class, in fact. I can go from awake to the bottom of the ocean in five minutes flat, like a high diver off a cliff. It’s a longstanding talent of mine, but I’ve noticed, lately, that unlike other facilities that wane with middle age, my napping skills are only growing stronger. Times were when I wouldn’t have dared reach for a nap unless I had a clean hour before the next commitment. Now, with even 15 minutes to spare – 10 at an absolute push – I’ll risk it. It might look like narcolepsy, but I know the truth: that micro-napping is the key to everything.
I mean, not everything, obviously. But it is definitely the key to functionality after 4pm, the second shift when your kids come home from school and you reward them with your frazzled, after-work energy. Too much screen-time happens in my house because the idea of sitting on the floor to play Anarchy Pancakes or Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza with my nine-year-olds feels like a request to put on iron trousers and climb a steep hill. (And, as I’ve discovered, the only thing worse than not playing is playing in a limp, half-arsed way then calling the game off after one round with a bright “that was fun!” that makes everyone scowl.)
But daily schedules are tight, particularly at the end of the year, when after-school programmes screech to a halt days and weeks before school does. Most of us, on an average day, don’t have the option to disappear into the abyss for the Christmas mega-nap (which clocks in at two or more hours), or even to hit the supposed sweet-spot of napping that lies between 30 and 90 minutes. I am here to tell you, however, that if you really put your mind to it, you can turn a 10-minute fragment into the full deep dive.
There is some existing research on micro-napping, contrary to my initial confidence that I had invented it. The phenomenon of micro-naps isn’t to be confused with something called “microsleep”, which is categorised as a sleep disorder – a side-effect of sleep deprivation or working night shifts that is measured in seconds – and occurs unbidden, for example while driving. Micro-napping is a conscious decision to hit the sofa and pull the plug for relatively small amounts of time that can still prove beneficial.
The research indicates that very short naps of five to 10 minutes can increase mental alertness in a way that longer naps cannot. Meanwhile, all the benefits of longer naps apply to mini ones, too, which is to say that they may increase executive function, improve memory retention, and enhance cognition.
Still, on paper at least, the micro-nap can cause anxiety on two fronts: first, that you won’t fall asleep in time to make use of such a short window, and second, that you will fall asleep and will miss the off-ramp, waking up three hours later to discover that social services is babysitting your children. You can obviously use the alarm function on your phone to backstop your micro-nap, but I have never found it necessary. In my experience, when you tell yourself you only have 10 minutes, some kind of internal clock kicks in, similar to the one that wakes us every hour when we know we have an early flight to catch. I’ve never overslept.
On the contrary, I surface from the tiny nap to check the time sometimes two or three times within that 10-minute period. What is odd about the sleep experience is that the sense of time passing is completely distorted; at the end of a micro-nap, my sense is that I could have been out for 20 minutes or two hours. The experience of losing consciousness, even for three minutes, bends time in such a way that it feels as if I have pulled down a much longer sleep.
As for the anxiety that it’ll take too long for the micro-nap to take off, I would urge you simply to believe in yourself. You can do this. At any given moment, but particularly at this time of the year, most of us are sleep deprived, exhausted, bombed out and used up. You can decide to look at the clock and, like a radio presenter faced with the elongated minutes leading up to the news, change your experience of time, so that seconds become minutes, minutes become hours, and the 10-minute nap becomes a meaningful amount of time to fall beneath the waves. Happy Christmas and good napping!
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
