My grandfather can fall asleep in about 12 seconds. It’s amazing to watch, and he just might be on to something big. Take a Nap! purports to be “The scientific plan to make you smarter, healthier, more productive”.1 Sara Mednick starts off with some nap advocacy, the usual bit about how we run ourselves into the ground with self-destructive habits, etc. The best part falls in the next section dedicated to the science of sleep, which I think is pretty fascinating.
I first started getting interested in sleep as means-to-dubious-ends when I stumbled on Steve Pavlina’s journey into polyphasic sleep and further reading into the Uberman sleep schedule. I was hoping for a ringing endorsement of these fringe adventures, but sadly, Mednick is not a big fan.
Mednick walks us through the stages of sleep, starting from mild alpha waves, to that embarrassing twitching when you first go under, to transitional stage 1 sleep, the recurring soup of light stage 2 sleep, then to the deep slow wave sleep of stages 3 and 4, and onward to that REM where so much magic happens. The cool thing is that sleep research indicates that each of these stages has unique benefits to your health. And when you know that, you can learn to calibrate your sleep to get what you want. And we all love to get what we want.
If you take a look at the cover of the book, you’ll see a cool little nap planning wheel. It’s actually a plastic disc that you can spin around according to when you woke up that day, and that will let you customize your napping for the results you have in mind. There’s even a recipe for the “perfect nap”. Of course, self-improvement takes some work. Mednick has a program to walk you through some self-assessment you can do over a couple weeks, which of course I didn’t do. But I learned a lot from reading through it.
All in all, it was actually was a pretty good book. I nap on the couch2 at work every day, but never really put much systematic thought into it. At the least, this book has been a good lesson in self-awareness. I love the idea that we can learn about these physiological mysteries and apply our knowledge to everyday demands. Every now and then, science really comes through for us.
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1. Those with good taste in music will be reminded of Radiohead’s tune, “Fitter, Happier” (lyrics).
2. We used to have this incredible cot that would instantly put me to sleep. Alas, the cot was taken away in order to keep things from looking too tacky. We have to keep up appearances.
Mark Larson 