“It is time to start unveiling the power of naps for a supercharged heart.”
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Naps are pretty great, right? Well, it turns out they might save your life. A new peer-reviewed, observational study published in the journal Heart has identified a napping sweet spot of sorts, and it might mean you’ll want to adjust your schedule.
Researchers found that one or two naps a week could reduce your chance of having a heart attack or a stroke, after studying 3,462 randomly selected residents of Lausanne, Switzerland, between the ages of 35 and 75.
Over the course of three years, the researchers had the participants check in weekly and report their sleeping habits from the previous week. The researchers tracked the health of the participants for five years following the end of the three-year period.
Nearly 60 percent of participants said they were not napping. Around one in five said they napped one or two times per week. Almost a quarter said they took three or more naps per week. (The researchers observed 155 fatal and non-fatal cardiovascular disease events during the monitoring period.)
Napping Occasionally Is Best for Your Cardiovascular Health
It appears napping occasionally is best for your cardiovascular health. Those who napped once or twice a week were found to have a 48 percent lower likelihood of having a heart attack or stroke.
There’s disappointing news for advocates of a daily nap, though: The researchers did not observe the same change in cardiovascular health for those who napped more frequently than once or twice a week.
The researchers also did not find that nap duration was especially important when it comes to cardiovascular health. One of the challenges the researchers faced is there isn’t a “gold standard,” as they put it, for what is considered a nap.
Why Isn’t There a Nap Gold Standard?
This is actually a subject of fierce debate. Sleep researchers have never officially defined the nap, and different cultures view naps differently. (How long is a nap? I would say between 10 minutes and three hours, but that’s just me.) Sleep researchers say a nap between 20 and 30 minutes in the early afternoon is the perfect nap.
You may be at work during optimal napping time, which means you might have to pull a George Costanza and sleep in the fort you’ve created under your desk.
The researchers indicate there’s still quite a bit of research to do before we’ll understand how naps and cardiovascular health are related, but they feel this study is a good start.
“The study of napping is a challenging but also a promising field with potentially significant public health implications,” the study concludes. “While there remain more questions than answers, it is time to start unveiling the power of naps for a supercharged heart.”
Media via Flickr / Michael Chaize
(For the source of this, and many additional important articles, please visit: https://www.inverse.com/article/59138-study-naps-heart-attacks-strokes-healthy/)