Boost the rest of your day!
Fellow Steemians,
Do you ever take a break between writing posts and take a Powernap?
You should!
You might have heard that there is no point to catch up sleep during the night if you did not sleep much the night before.. but did you know that you can actually catch up sleep by doing a Powernap?
Powernaps give you a lot of energy and make sure that information and emotions get processed in your brain. Besides has the Powernap healing powers for your hormonal balans, which reduces stress and your immune system. All of that is studied by the university of Sorbonno, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolsm.
How long should you be sleeping?
That actually totally depends on what you want to achieve! If you had a normal day and you want a energy boost, 20 minutes is all it takes. Did you actually have a emotionally had day or did you learn a lot of new things? Than a powernap of one hour to 1,5 hours is best! This difference comes form the various phases of a sleeping cycle. In this picture you see the different cycle from an average person in one night of sleep.
Per sleeping cycle, we have 4 different phases and 4 different areas of the brain are processing information. All lengths of Powernaps are good for you, but the longer sleep the more brain areas you give rest. We can divide the length of a Powernap arrange in 4 different categories, based on the different brain phases:
- The Energy Powernap
- The Drunk Nap
- The Cognitive Nap
- The Total Nap
Energy Powernap (10'-20')
10 till 20 minutes of sleeping gives you an extra boost of alertness and energy. If you are ready with this nap you shall feel positive effects right away. If you have to drive a lot at night or you want to go hit the gym later: choose the Energy Powernap!
Drunk Powernap (30')
A Powernap of 30 minutes is the least pleasurable to awake from: this brings a drunk/hungover kind of feel, most people describe this as the least pleasurable kind of nap. This feeling can last for about half an hour. After this half hour you will still experience the same positive effects as with the Energy Powernap.
Cognitive Powernap
To gain more Steempower it would be good if you would mesmerisme good comments and articles, so you can talk to them later! To increase your cognitive memory it is best to sleep for about one hour. By doing this you can later retrieve events and knowledge better. Your body has given it a better place in your memory! After about one hour sleep you would still wake up as a grumpy old cat and you could feel lost a bit :p.
Total Powernap
To get all the advantages of the Powernap it is recommended that you sleep one complete cycle: 90 minutes. At the end of this cycle is where the magical REM phase starts: The phase where you dream the most. By going through the Steemfest in your dreams you improve 3 additional brain functionalities: 1. your creativity increases, so you can create AWESOME blog posts. 2. You automize new physical new learned skills, like that Markdown Styling in your posts you are starting to use. 3 You become emotionally more stable, you are unstoppable! 90 minutes of sleep will give you a relaxed feeling when you wake up. Maybe we should take an example to the Spanish with their Siestas!
Allright Steemians, I want to give you 3 sleeping tips to become a PowerNapMaster:
- You want to know at what time you could take a Powernap best? you can check it here
- You can use all kinds of apps to monitor your sleeping cycles: I recommend Sleep like Android for Android users
- Drink coffee before your Energy nap, the caffein will kick in after 20 minutes, you wake up and you will take of as a rocket ship
Thanks everybody who voted for my introduction Blog! If you haven't seen it yet, check it out here: Introduction to me
Big shoutout to @barrydutton who gave me a boost to write more articles. Even while I am traveling I am still mega motivated now to write on Steemit!