PNTV: Take a Nap, Change Your Life! by Sara Mednick (#125)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, another great book, Take a Nap, Change youe Life by Dr. Sara Mednick. This one comes with a handy dandy little nap wheel to help us find the optimal time to take a nap. Very cool. Take a nap, change your life. Sara Mednick, as always, we've got five big ideas we're going to cover in around 10 minutes. We've got the philosopher's note that I'm drawing these ideas from, which I drew from the book, of course. Got a bunch of them in the note. Check that out for more. For now, let's look at these five ideas. Number one, siesta, DNA. So Sarah starts the book by saying, look, we're the only animal species that tries to get all of its sleep in one chunk. Every other animal on the planet is multiphasic. They sleep more than once a day. We're the only ones that try to get by on just one session of sleep. And she says even that is recent. Right? It's just the Industrial Revolution that changed things. It's written in our DNA. Taking a nap is written in our DNA is the point that she makes and proves unequivocally. Then she says the siesta. Do you know where the word siesta comes from? It's very cool. Comes from sexta, which was the Roman word for their sixth hour. The Romans were all about it and they said the sixth hour, which was about noon on their little, whatever you call it, daily calendar. Sexta. The sixth hour was the time to nap. It's a time to retreat, take a break, take a nap. Sexta. Well, we now know that as siesta, but it's a part of our human experience, and to deny that is not smart. That's the first big idea. It's written in our DNA. Sexta, siesta, 1879. What's special about 1879? Anyone? 1879 was the year that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Thank you, Thomas. Very, very cool of you. But what happened since 1879? Now we've got artificial light. Unbelievably cool. But I wonder if that had an effect on our sleep patterns. Huh? Well, let's look. Sarah tells us that in 1879, before Thomas brought the light bulb to the world, how much did our great, great or whatever it is, grandparents sleep? 10 hours a night? On an average night? Well, on an average night, the Average person slept 10 hours. That's crazy. 10 hours of sleep? Yeah. The sun went down, you went down, you Got up a little before the sunrise, equals 10 hours of sleep. But then all of a sudden we've got artificial light and wow, you can do things after the sun goes down. Unbelievably cool. But guess what? It took us millions of years of evolution that was altered in 1879. If you look at the 20th century, Sarah tells us we went from 10 hours of sleep in 1879 to 8 hours of sleep in the 20th century to an average of 6.7 hours of sleep in the US 20% drop more than 30% less sleep than we got less than one hundred and fifty years ago. So we've evolved over millions and millions and millions of years. And in the last 150 years, we reduced our sleep by 30%. What do you think about that? It just doesn't make any sense. And the result is an extraordinary amount of fatigue. She calls it the silent killer. And we're going to talk a lot about rest. We've got another note coming up on our episode on the power of rest and another one on power sleep. They all say the same exact thing, that the sleep deficit of our nation is as dangerous for any nation, is as dangerous as the actual economic deficit. It's as dangerous to sleep, to drive after not getting a night of sleep. If you skip a night of sleep and you drive, that's as dangerous as drunk driving. You're unbelievably impaired when you're getting 30% less sleep than what's optimal. It's crazy. Again, we'll talk about that more. For now, we'll move on. 1879, we get 10 hours of sleep. Nap and sleep. People say, yeah, but is napping going to interrupt my sleep? No. There's no research that shows that napping is going to alter and mess up your sleep. It's a lot of kind of stuff out there, but she's unequivocal about it. Now, obviously, you don't want to take a nap right before you want to go to sleep. So give yourself at least three hours before you intend to go to sleep for your nap. Right? But otherwise, napping, if anything, actually helps you sleep. Sleep begets sleep. If you're able to turn it off, you're going to get a better night's sleep, not worse. So let that myth go away. Trust the good doctor Sara Mednick and all of her research by her colleagues. There is not a shred of evidence, she says that napping during the day is going to interrupt your sleep at night. All right, I trust her. I didn't even Talk about the benefits. I should talk about the benefits of sleep. She's got 20 reasons why sleep is good. Basically every single thing you want to improve your life is improved in your life is improved by napping. There you go. Improved memory, improved performance, improved mood, etc, etc, etc. Winston Churchill, who she references and others, napped religiously during the war. What's funny is Thomas Edison napped. Actually it's a big part of their practices. Winston Churchill jokes and says, look, no half measures. During the war he would actually work and then he'd strip down, he'd get back in bed and he'd take a nap. And he says no half measures. You got to go all in. Really go all in. Then he said, look, you get at least two days in the process, at least a good day and a half by splitting your day up. I'm going to take one after I finish this. I've had a good morning, it's around noon for me. Sexta. I'm getting ready for a nap, kind of excited about it. And you're going to improve everything. So then she says, who has time to nap? Right? It's a common excuse. I don't have time to nap, I'm too busy. All right, we'll check in on that. And again realize that your performance is going to be greatly enhanced. Now you might not be able to go Winston Churchill on it and strip down in your office and take a nap. That might freak some people out. But you can find ways. If you take an hour off in and you're going out to lunch and you're spending X amount of time to go to lunch and to come back. What if you brought your lunch and you took 10, 15, 20 minutes to take a nap wherever you can? What if you were able to do that? That's a huge benefit. In one of the other notes, they talk about the fact that research out of Harvard has shown that a nap as short as six minutes can improve performance. Right. Who has time to nap? You do. You just need to make it, you need to prioritize it. Which is tied to our final idea here. She talks about the fact that for a lot of people it's hard to find the environment to actually create the nap. Take some work, okay, make it happen. But then they still have this obstacle where they think that napping is lazy, that they're a lazy person. You're a lazy person if you're napping. I know a lot of people who think that we need to let that go again. All the research shows that napping improves Performance is a smart thing to do. And do it. Shut that part of your brain off and just do it. That's our fifth and final big idea. So there you go. It's a super quick look at take a nap, change your life. I hope I at least convince you to consider taking a nap or just jump in and do it. Naps are awesome. In our house, we call them napitations. Where you lay down, you kind of do, you know, whatever you're going to do. You might do a guided meditation or you might just do your own deep relaxation, which is what I do. I do both. Guided meditation or my own little guided meditation. And then oftentimes I'll fall asleep. Sometimes, not every time do I fall asleep, but oftentimes I do. Most of the time, I would say even just for, I don't know, 5, 10, 15 minutes out of that, wake up with a little buzz and my, wow, I feel great. We call those napitations. Little bit of meditation, a little bit of napitations. So there you go. Take a nap, change your life. It's in our DNA. We're the only animal on the planet that tries to get all of its sleep in one phase. We're multiphas by nature. In our DNA, siesta comes from the Roman sexta, the sixth hour. It's been baked into our culture. The industrial revolution is what brought it out. All of a sudden we had watches which could tell us what time it was and we needed to run on a certain time. That doesn't make any sense. Now we just go, go, go, go, go. 1879, Thomas Edison. Thank you for the light bulb. We were sleeping 10 hours a night, though. Then we dropped it 20% to 8 hours in the 20th century. Dropped it again to 66.7 hours. Some crazy percentage of people get less than 6 hours. I don't want to think about that. I personally shoot for eight. Nine plus nine is my target. Tony Schwartz, one of the leading thinkers on energy management, saw him talk at a recent event on conscious capitalism. In nine hours. That's his target. Good enough for him. Good enough for me. Let's do it. We'll talk more about that in other contexts going forward. Napping and sleeping. It's a myth that napping is going to negatively impact your sleep. Not true. If anything, it actually helps it. Just make sure you nap more than three hours before you're going to go to sleep. Who has time to nap? You do. You just got to make it. With anything you prioritize in your life, you can make it happen. You got to believe in the benefits enough. Your why needs to be strong enough and then make it happen. And then just do it. Get over all the negative baggage and just do it. Napping is awesome. Take a nap. Change your life. Hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See ya.