Feeling tired and sleepy? Can't think clearly anymore? Clearly what you need is sleep, but what if time is a luxury and you have a deadline to meet? Then you can't really enjoy a quick nap and get all the benefits that come with it like improved productivity, greater awareness, increased energy levels, etc. Or can you? Yes, you can – without coffee or drinking a can of RedBull. What I have in mind is taking a power nap, which is a much healthier choice.
What Is A Power Nap?
A power nap is a quick nap of less than 30 minutes that revitalizes the body and mind, improves learning and awareness. It's only 30 minutes, because after that your body goes to a state of deep sleep and waking up from that state would make you even sleepier. So, not oversleeping is very important and that's definitely to our advantage, because time is what we don't have right now.
How Do You Take a Power Nap?
From my personal experience I can say that taking a power nap isn't easy. The biggest obstacle that I faced was to actually fall asleep. I'm one of these people that has a hard time falling asleep; I could basically lay down for 30 minutes and not fall asleep at all.
If you have the same problem then you may want to calibrate your alarm clock a bit and set it to ring after 35 minutes or so, but you don't want to risk putting it more than 35 minutes in case you fall asleep very fast. Then you would go into deep sleep and you would feel even sleepier than before.
Also, you should try out sleeping for different periods of time to see how you feel after, because you might feel better after 20 minutes of sleep rather than after 30… or maybe a 10 minute nap works best for you. Experiment with it.
Sharpen The Saw
What if you don't have 30, 20 or even 10 minutes to spare? Every second is precious and you can't waste a minute, because you have a super important deadline?
Let me tell you a story:
A man was busy sawing a tree for 4 hours. He was tired, all soaked with sweat.
Another man walked by and asked, "Why don't you sharpen the saw?"
"Don't got time for that, too busy sawing," he replied.
Sounds silly right? He definitely would finish the job faster if he would just take a few minutes to sharpen the saw, but he just doesn't see the obvious.
The same goes with power naps. If you say you don't have time for a nap, you are saying you don't have time to sharpen the saw.
Ask yourself is it better to work unproductively for hours, or just take a little bit of time off and take a power nap to work productively afterwards?
Conclusion
I highly recommend you to replace your coffee or energy drinks with a power nap. All that caffeine is tapping into your energy reserves and you don't want to empty them out. A power nap restores your energy naturally, having only positive results on your body and mind.
Try taking a power nap and share your experience in the comments below.
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