Naps provided that they are less than a 90 minute cycle can be very beneficial for a lot of people. Many of us naturally feel a
dip in energy and focus late in the afternoon, in fact if we look at wakefulness we find that we get that after getting that morning light exposure cortisol goes up, we feel awake and then around 2 to 4pm there is a drop in alertness and ability to learn and then it naturally comes back up before it tapers off as the night goes on.
For some naps can be great, I personally love naps.
If you wake up from naps feeling groggy that is most likely because you are not sleeping very well at night so you are dropping into rem or deeper forms of sleep during the nap which is not ideal.
When you get that dip in energy in the afternoon DO NOT reach for the caffeine, that will affect your sleep later on that night.
If you can take a nap, if not, breathing and meditation can be a great tool at this point of the day.
Meditation allows you to bring the body and the mind into a deep state of relaxation, as a minimum 10 minutes would be a good place to start.
I use apps such as Calm, or Shift State.
But Helder, I just can’t fall asleep during the day?
Most of the time the reason for this is because people are just not good at calming down, meditation and breathing is a great tool to use and over time it teaches us to be able to feel calm and sleep will just happen automatically.
We all know how easy it is to force ourselves to stay awake, just see what happens this weekend!
However we can’t just turn off a light switch and fall asleep, as much as it would be nice.
So if you are struggling to fall asleep we really can’t control the mind with mind, instead we need to look at coping mechanisms that uses the body, and things like meditation, yoga, breathing all involve using the body to control the mind.
Wrestling with the mind to fall asleep is just a fight not worth having.
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