Why a Short Afternoon Nap Can Leave You Brighter Than a Long One, and How to Take One on a Dark Saturday

By mid November the light starts to go not long after three, and a Saturday afternoon on the sofa can turn into a heavy, accidental sleep that leaves you foggier than before. It is tempting to think a longer nap is a better one. A careful little study from 2006 suggests the opposite: for most of us, a short nap does more, and a long one can briefly do less.

The study was run by Amber Brooks and Leon Lack at Flinders University in Australia and published in the journal Sleep. They asked 24 healthy young adults to sleep for only about five hours the night before, then gave them an afternoon nap at three o'clock. On different days the nap was five, ten, twenty or thirty minutes of actual sleep, or no nap at all, and each time the researchers measured how sleepy and alert people felt and how well they did on simple attention tasks.

The ten-minute nap came out best overall. Its benefits showed up straight away and some of them lasted for around two and a half hours. The twenty-minute nap helped too, but the lift took a little longer to arrive. The five-minute nap did very little. And the thirty-minute nap left people groggy at first, with alertness and performance dipping before they recovered, which is the feeling sleep researchers call sleep inertia.

The usual explanation is that a longer nap gives you time to slip into deeper sleep, and waking from deep sleep is what feels like wading through treacle. A short nap tends to stay in the lighter stages, so you surface more easily. It is worth being honest about the limits here. This was a small study of young adults who were short on sleep, and it measured how people felt and performed in the hour or two afterwards, not anything about long-term health.

Still, it matches what many people notice for themselves. If you would like to try it, keep it simple. Lie down somewhere comfortable but not too cosy, set a gentle alarm for about twenty minutes to allow for the time it takes to drift off, and get up when it goes even if you feel you could carry on. Early afternoon tends to work better than late, and if you find it harder to fall asleep at night, a shorter nap, or none, may suit you better.

A short rest is not a fix for nights that are regularly too short, and if you are tired all the time it is worth a conversation with your GP rather than more naps. But on a grey Saturday after a long week, ten or twenty quiet minutes can be a kind thing to give yourself.

It helps to have something soft to drift to. On Create Your Zen, pick a snowy mountain or a forest at dusk, layer steady rainfall under it, keep it low, and press play. When the alarm goes, open the curtains, have a glass of water, and let the rest of the afternoon begin.