A YouTube Heroic +1 by Brian Johnson (Feb 25, 2024) revisiting his earlier piece on “napitations” — a blend of napping and meditation. The video summarizes research on naps (historical multiphasic sleep patterns, cultural siesta origins, and modern studies showing short naps—down to six minutes—boost learning and cognition) and recommends midday naps as a powerful tool for productivity and well-being.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. On February 25, 2018, exactly six years ago, we shared a plus one called Napitations, in which I introduced the world to the idea of a napitation. Now I just took a fantastic napitation during my beast mode plus one production day. I'm now 5.6 hours of deep work in and thought to myself, self, we should talk about naps and napitations again. So here we are. Napitations. Yes, napitations. 50% nap, 50% meditation, 101% magic. Back in the day we did a plus one on the science of naps and how powerful they are for our well being. And of course we know meditation is equally epic and have an entire class on Meditation 101. So why not put the two together? Here's the quick recap on why naps are so powerful. First, recall that the most elite performers in Anders Ericsson's research, see our notes on peak, got the most sleep, 8 hours and 36 minutes on average in any given 24 hour period of time. Now, as part of that research, he told us that they took on average a 30 plus minute nap every day. Now for the recap on the science of napping. Yes, there's a science of napping. Get this. We're the only animal that tries to get all of its sleep in one cycle. Every other animal on the planet is multiphasic, meaning they have multiple phases of sleep. And we human animals used to be multiphasic as well. It was only recently that we eliminated the afternoon nap from our normal everyday lives. As Sara Mednick, one of the world's leading sleep nap researchers, tells us in her great book, Take a Nap, Change youe Life. Naps are literally written in our DNA. The naps used to be written into our cultural DNA as well. Did you know that back in ancient Roman times, they actually had a precise time when they were supposed to slow down, check out and take a nap? It was their sixth hour, roughly noon. For us, they called it sexta. And guess what? Their sixth hour, or sexta, is the origin of our modern siesta. Of course, it's no longer cool in our modern society to check out and nap. But you've got to know that this shift away from our midday reboots is a really recent phenomenon. So back to the research. Sarah tells us that learning after a nap is equal to learning after a full night of sleep. And that test scores of non nappers deteriorated across the day. Research out of Harvard tells us that a nap as short as six minutes. Yes, six minutes can significantly boost your brain power. Six minutes? That's nuts. And that's today's plus one. You want to be a supercharged and joyful human? Take a nap. It might just change your life.
