"You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner. . . Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one - well, at least one and a half, I'm sure. When the war started, I had to sleep during the day because that was the only way I could cope with my responsibilities." - Winston Churchill

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Learning + Sleep = Memory Consolidation

Your working memory stores information temporarily, but its capacity is small. As you integrate knowledge throughout the day—from the mundane to the complex—important information you learned earlier gets replaced and lost forever. Neuroscientists confirm that the brain shuts off after a certain amount of time. Just as cramming for exams in college only produced a short-term gain, there is a limit to how much information we can absorb. During breaks in learning, we need sleep to integrate and hard-wire the brain with what we've just learned. After sleeping we can then resume or get back into the learning groove. Neuroscientists call this “memory consolidation.”

People can maximize their brains’ ability to retain learning with the right kind and amount of sleep. “If you have learned a lot of information and sleep on it, you can wake up with better insights into what you have just learned,” says Ed Boyden, Ph.D., assistant professor in the MIT Department of Biological Engineering and The MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Group in Cambridge, Mass.

Sleep occurs in cycles of about 90 minutes with the deepest and most important phase—rapid eye movement (REM)— coming nearly 60 minutes into the cycle. If you wake up in your REM cycle as the brain rewires, you may feel disoriented. Without REM sleep, we lose what we learned the day preceding sleep,” says Pierce Howard, Ph.D., director of research at the Center for Applied Cognitive Studies in Charlotte, N.C. Citing Cornell University psychology professor James Maas, he explains that sleep “transports memories in the form of neural patterns to the hippocampus area of the brain and resupplies the system with neurotransmitters used up during the previous day.”

Compromised productivity

Over half the American workforce reports sleepiness on the job interferes with the amount of work they get done AND diminishes the quality of their work by about 30 percent. For employers, the costs are felt in terms of low productivity, reduced profits, high rates of staff turnover and increased healthcare costs. What can you do it you're feeling sleep deprived during the day? According to Dr. Maas, naps are a good idea if you can't manage to get one continuous period of sleep at night that is long enough to enable you to be fully alert all day long. A heavy meal at lunch doesn't make you sleepy; a 'post-lunch' dip in energy just reveals that you're somewhat sleep deprived to begin with.

Naps are Natural

Recent research indicates that the human body is inclined to rest in the middle of the afternoon, even after adequate nocturnal sleep. It's natural to feel an energy trough approximately twelve hours after the middle of your night's rest. James Maas thinks this may be one reason why so many accidents occur between 2 and 4 pm. He also notes that naps taken about eight hours after waking have been proven to do much more for you than if you simply added those twenty minutes to your regular nighttime sleep.

Learn Like Einstein

Naps can improve your critical and analytical thinking abilities. Albert Einstein felt that his daily naps refreshed his mind and made him more creative. Sleep experts such as Dr. Sara C. Mednick, agree that a nap should be about fifteen to thirty minutes in duration, not longer. Longer naps permit your body to move into a deeper Delta sleep cycle. Waking up becomes very difficult, you feel terribly groggy rather than refreshed and it takes you longer to recover.

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