Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

Kelly Howell: Welcome once again to Theater of the Mind and our show today is about a scientific plan to make you smarter, healthier and more productive. My guest is Dr. Sarah Mednick, a researcher at the Salk Institute and the world's leading authority on napping. Her research indicates that fitting a nap into your everyday schedule, increases alertness, boosts creativity, and reduces stress. She says that a daily nap may also reduce the risk of a heart attack, aid in weight loss, and improve memory. But who has time for a nap? Let's find out. Dr Mednick, welcome to theater of the mind.
Sarah Mednick: Hi, how are you?
Kelly: Good! Thanks for coming on the show today. Where are you calling from?
Sarah: San Diego.
Kelly: Beautiful.
Sarah: Yeah, it's very lovely here.
Kelly: Well, Sarah, could you tell us more about yourself and what sparked you to study the benefits of napping? Were you always a napper?
Sarah: No, I actually wasn't really a napper. I got into grad school, and my father had always been a great napper, and I always was just too active and too crazy to rest in the middle of the day. But, when I got into grad school, I definitely wanted to look into the relationship between sleep and learning which is very strong, and I found that there wasn't any real research to support my father's strong believing in his nap, and so I just deciding instead of studying nocturnal sleep, I would do exactly the same method of study, which is basically test people once before... on a bunch of cognitive tests, once before they go to sleep and then once after they go to sleep to see what they've learned. But, instead of it being nocturnal sleep I just put a nap in between those two learning sessions and found that people were actually performing much better after the nap and even that they were performing as well as they would of if they'd had a full night sleep.
Kelly: That's amazing.
Sarah: Yeah, and that's when I decided to give it a try myself, and had some really great results, just really was able to verify with my own experimentation that napping was making me even a more productive person.
Kelly: Do you nap everyday?
Sarah: I truly do too, yeah. Today I would be napping right now, actually. [laughing] It's right around my naptime.
Kelly: It's my naptime too! I have to tell you, I read your book and that afternoon I took a nap and I woke up, I slept for about an hour, and I woke up and I felt like a completely new person, it was amazing.
Sarah: That's the idea, and you can actually work much longer and with more focus for the rest of the day. So even take that hour out is actually going to buy you so much more time.
Kelly: Well who are some of our most brilliant nappers and do you think napping is one of the reasons they're so brilliant?
Sarah: Well napping has definitely been used throughout history by inventors, world leaders, artists and just regular people. Like Bill Clinton is a regular napper, and Lance Armstrong is a napper, Thomas Edison, a lot of great inventors and scientists have been devoted to napping. These are people who nap in very different ways, some people nap and really only nap, they don't really sleep that much. And other people they're fully invested in their sleep at night and then they also take a nap in the middle of the day. Some people nap for short amounts of time, some people nap for long amounts of time, but if you ever speak to a napper, you realize that really it's part of their entire method for being who they are.
Kelly: Your list of cognitive benefits of napping is amazing. Should we go over some of them?
Sarah: Sure. OK. So the cognitive benefits of napping actually are related to the kind of sleep that you are getting and that's kind of an important part of thinking of all this, and sleep is a very important issue. It's something that we don't really think that much about, but we spend a third of our lives doing, so it's a nice thing to get to know for yourself. And take a nap also goes into helping people understand about their sleep.


But first, if you get into sleep, the first few, the first 20 minutes are really stage two sleep, it's a light form of sleep, and that form of sleep of just 20 minutes has been shown to be good for alertness and also for motor memory, including learning new motor skills such as becoming a better typists, or learning a new dance, or learning how to play the violin. Anything that requires coordinated muscle movements. And then if you sleep beyond 20 minutes, into say up to 60 minutes you're experiencing this very deep, rich, restorative, flowwave sleep, which has been shown to be good for some different kinds of memory, such as spatial memory which is good for your ability to learn a map of a city or the placement of spatial objects in a room and also it's been shown to be very restorative for clearing your mind if you've ever felt that feeling in the end of the day when you've done a lot of information processing and at some point your mind just feels like it's totally full.


If you take a longer nap around 60 minutes you'll wake up and feel like your head is very clear, and research has been showing that slowwave sleep can be good for that. And then if you continue to sleep beyond 60 minutes up to 90 minutes you're going to move into rapid eye movement sleep, which is REM sleep, it's the famous sleep that is known for having the most vivid dreams, and that stage of sleep has been shown to be good for creating, for creativity, inspiring new associations between different kinds of ideas, also good for your perceptual skills, and your visual memory, your auditory memory. If you're somebody who is like a bird watcher and you're learning how to spot a new bird in a tree, or a radiologist who's learning how to detect tumors in scans, these are all visual skills that you develop. A musician learning the sound of a new instrument, that would be an auditory skill.
Kelly: Yeah, you mentioned in your book a concert pianist.
Sarah: Yeah, yeah, that's another. She's a great napper, yeah. She's a concert pianist who in her training and she says that most musicians use napping in their training. That they do a lot of practice, all day long they're rehearsing, but then before every performance and even before every practice even if there isn't a performance she'll take a good long hour and a half, hour long nap, and you know, she'll actually sacrifice getting to the theater on time. She told me one story that she'd napped, she was so determined to have her nap that she woke up just minutes before she was supposed to be on stage, but she managed to get there, I think she was lately and she realized that didn't matter as long as she had her nap, that was the most important thing.
Kelly: See, now, this is what I don't understand, how somebody right before a concert performance, could take a nap?
Sarah: Mmhmm.
Kelly: You know, just to turn off the anxiety, or tension, or whatever people feel before they do a big performance, performance anxiety.
Sarah: Yeah, exactly. Well right before my dissertation defense, I had about 45 minutes of free time and I was sitting there totally anxious, twiddling my thumbs and realizing I had nothing to do but be anxious so I decided to take a nap instead. So it is interesting. Some people use napping as a way of actually controlling their anxiety that you can actually have such a feeling of "I'm going to get totally overwhelmed by all of this information going on in my head or I'm going to shut it out and take a quick nap."
Kelly: But some people just don't fall asleep easily in the middle of the day, especially if they had a good night sleep. How do you address this issue?
Sarah: Sure, actually napping does take practice. It's like anything that you're learning how to do, it takes practice to tell your body and your mind that it's OK to actually tune out for awhile and the first few times, the first couple of weeks even, may be a little bit odd. You know, you may actually need to really give yourself extremely strict guidelines about what time you're going to be napping, a very regular practice, make it a habitual experience because we are animals of habit. And we really do adapt to situations that we continually put ourselves into, the same way adapt to nocturnal sleep and say "OK, now I'm taking off my daytime clothes, I'm putting on my nightgown, I'm brushing my teeth, I'm going into bed." These are all signals to our body that we are supposed to be going to sleep.


In the same way you need to create signals and make it a regular situation for your body to learn to daytime nap. And the other aspect of daytime napping is that a lot of people use caffeine throughout the day in many different sources from coffee to highsugar drinks to medication that they might be on that have some hidden caffeine. These are different nap blockers that actually do prevent people from napping. So you have to become more aware of what you are eating and whether you actually are creating a good nap environment for your body.
Kelly: So, how long before a nap should you abstain from caffeine drinks? Or do you have to stop them all together?
Sarah: No, No, I have caffeine every morning. Caffeine can be in your body between four to six hours. For some people even longer so it can be very damaging for any daytime sleep. The other thing is also true that if you are somebody who has a three pm cup of tea or a cup of coffee and you find that its difficult for you to get to sleep at night, these are all the vicious cycles that we play with ourselves. We're too tired in the afternoon so instead of taking a nap we have some caffeine and that prevents us from getting to sleep early enough so that we are too tired again the next day. So these are all [laughs] things to become aware of.
Kelly: And it's interesting to because it's around three o'clock, tea time, that we reach for a cup of tea or that afternoon cup of coffee...
Sarah: or a diet coke or any of those kinds of things.
Kelly: Uhhuh.
Sarah: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it's no surprise that we have rituals around these periods where either one would naturally be taking a nap or one would need to go and have some coffee.
Kelly: And I want to talk more about that because we do seem to have a very natural biorhythm that is conducive to napping right?
Sarah: Yep, that's right.
Kelly: Maybe you can just quickly talk about that circadian rhythm?
Sarah: Sure. So what that means is that in every biological animal there is a rhythm to it's activity which means that at some periods of it's cycle it's going to be active and some periods it's going to not be active, be inactive, and that's called it's circadian rhythm. We have a circadian because circa is around and dia is a day so around one day is our rhythm that we have a sort of an up and a low point. What has been discovered in early research is that napping actually figures into that circadian rhythm. And I guess I will tell you about the experiment that really was the thing that locked that into scientific fact. That happened actually a long time ago, at the beginning of the 1900's.
Kelly: Oh, what experiment was that?
Sarah: There was a German scientist who put people in to caves that were completely darkened and he asked people you know, there's no light in here so you're not going to know what time it is and you're not going to know what day it is but just do what you will want to do, you know eat when you want and sleep when you want and you know, they just wanted to watch them and what they found is the people naturally fell into two cycles in the day, the slept for a long period at night around six hours, seven hours, and then they returned to bed in the middle of the day twelve hours later, and took a nap. And that showed, actually, that when people are in their natural state without any kind of stimulants and without knowing what time it is they will actually have a dip in their activity levels in the middle of the day.
Kelly: That's interesting. The first thing I thought when I picked up your book was I don't have time for a nap and I think a lot of people have that kind of kneejerk reaction to napping what do you say to us diehards?
Sarah: Well the truth is you don't have time not to nap. That we are living in a world where we are actually very sleep deprived and the Nation Sleep Foundation finds that we are sleeping six point seven hours a night, and what we should be getting sleep experts say is eight hours of sleep a night and what that means is that there's an increase in all sorts of health related problems, fatigue related accidents, we're not only wasting our money by creating all sorts of problems you know, accidents and disasters, natural disasters and just problems at work and errors but also a lot of health risks are increasing such as risks for heart disease, diabetes, increased blood pressure, depression, libido, decreased productivity, so all these things have to do with sleep. That increases our stress levels across the day and decreases a lot of our more nurturing and including growth hormone and other aspects of things that occur when we are sleeping.


So what it means is that when you say you don't have time it's like saying you don't have time to work out, you don't have time to be good to yourself and treat yourself well and eat well and it kind of comes under the same category as all of the basic health needs that we have.
Kelly: Well what about people that do get eight hours of sleep a night? I'm one of those people. I just hit the pillow go to sleep and wake up eight hours later. [laughs]
Sarah: Yes, all of my research has been done in well rested adults, so people who are getting eight hours of sleep a night, and what I find is not only do the naps improve their performance but when I compare people who've napped to people who didn't nap across the day and I've tested them multiple times across the day, the people who didn't nap actually showed decreases in their performance across the day.
Kelly: Interesting.
Sarah: So it's very difficult to sustain an optimal level of performance for a full eight, nine, ten hours.
Kelly: What kind of test did you do? How did you measure cognition, creativity, those kind of things?
Sarah: I started doing only visual skills. I was testing visual memory and now I've moved into a lot of different kinds of memory. Spacial memory, motor, learning, a wide range of different tasks in fact with the military right now I've been doing some research with a DARPA funded grant looking comparing napping to caffeine to another drug called Modafinil and we're going to be working with Marine Corps actually to figure out whether we can do anything to help people in those situations who are under, you know extreme amounts of stress and a lot of information processing going on all at once and whether napping can actually be helpful for them.
Sarah: I hear they have some pretty wild intense drugs to give them. For when they have to fly for 48 hours.
Kelly: Yeah usually its just an amphetamine but they're actually trying to move away from amphetamines because of the high addiction rate with amphetamine and trying to go into drugs, a new drug is called Provigil, Adrafinil, it's the same drug and that has been shown to not really be addictive but people don't really take it as much because it doesn't have that buzz that you get from either caffeine or Madaf or amphetamine so you don't really realize that it's working or get addicted to feeling the rush of stimulants instead of just kind of being alert and not kind of in a rushed feel.
Sarah: Mmhmm. Well how can napping help with memorization and what strategies to you recommend for learning new things? A language, to read music, cramming for an exam how would you involve napping in that?
Kelly: So far, well say, take cramming for an exam, a good example is that if you look at people that haven't slept all night and then they go in and they take a test and they've been cramming all night long versus people who have been studying consistently and sleeping consistently and just study normally before the test what happens is they both basically do the same except that the person who crammed all night and didn't sleep, doesn't remember anything they did in the test. But they can spew it out immediately right after having crammed all night, but they don't have any retention. And what that means compared to people who are sleeping regularly and what that means is that sleep is somehow helping us with consolidating this information into longterm memory storage.


So if you are somebody who is, first it's always a better idea to be sleeping and studying all along throughout the semester, but if that's not what you can do, try to study in smaller bouts with little naps in between. If you are going to be in some sort of an allnighter for days and days and days, always do get some sleep because it definitely will help you with your consolidation process also keep you at a better level of mental stamina.


I think I remember reading something in your book about studying and then taking a nap. That some of your research subjects did that?
Sarah: Well, it sort of the same. That you want to be, that in my studies that people have trained on these different tasks in the morning and then they took a nap and then they trained again on the afternoon. They were tested on that same information in the afternoon and those who napped were much better than those who didn't nap.
Kelly: Is it possible to train someone to fall asleep quickly?
Sarah: Yes, so people who are nappers are very, very good at falling asleep quickly. They have a way of getting, as you said, right when your head hits the pillow you are very good at falling asleep. So nappers are usually good at falling asleep in any position in any amount of noise and whenever they want.
Kelly: I'm amazed at people like that. Catnappers they call themselves, right?
Sarah: Yeah. That's right.
Kelly: I'm kind of envious they can just close their eyes and sleep for 10 or 15 minutes and then be back.
Sarah: It's a real gift but it definitely is something you can learn. I know people who have learned across maybe a five year period to really become very, very good. And the other aspect of that is that you actually learn to sleep in less amounts of time. So you said that yesterday or I don't know when it was, butt you took a nap and you slept for an hour. Well, when I was napping in grad school which was four years ago, I would nap for an hour every day and it was always just exactly an hour and I would wake up and feel great. Now I don't actually need to nap that long. And if you talk to nappers you will hear the same thing. That you actually can nap for a shorter amount of time and seem to be napping more efficiently because you don't really...you go into sleep faster, get what you need and come out of it faster.
Kelly: Well people that just, catnappers, like we are talking about, are they sleep deprived or do they have some kind of magical shut off valve in their brain? Or is it just training and practice?
Sarah: Yeah, it's just training. It's just knowing. It's an ability to shut off the outside world and say 'OK there is a lot going on right now and I'm not able to deal with it and I don't want to deal with it and I'm just going to tune out.' It's the same as people who train themselves to meditate. You can actually learn how to get yourself into a deeply relaxed place and that's something that definitely through meditation classes can teach you. So you can also learn that with sleep.
Kelly: And it's a discipline. It takes practice. Well, how long did it take you to become such an expert napper?
Sarah: Well, I was sleep deprived because I was a grad student. So I learned very, very fast how to fall asleep and get a lot out of it and get right back. You know wake up immediately and feel great. It was never really a problem. And also when you are in grad school, you just have a lot more time and say around your own schedule. So you can work till three am if you feel like you goofed off in the daytime. So there are all these different lee ways around that schedule. But it takes about probably a month or two of dedicated practice to just get it into your own body and system to realize that 'OK now is actually when I will be napping'.
Kelly: Do you recommend that people choose the same time every day to nap?
Sarah: Definitely have a set schedule. Yes, definitely be able to tell yourself 'OK now.' Your body should be able to predict your nap. It should be telling you 'its time to nap' instead of you trying to force it to.
Kelly: See, around three in the afternoon is when I feel the dip in my energy and that's when I meditate. The benefits are kind of similar.
Sarah: Yes. A lot of research looking at supermediators seems to show that they don't really need to sleep as much. And these are people who are very, very practiced and that might be because there is some shared benefit between meditating and sleeping that is very unknown as of now. And it's a very interesting area of research that I would love to get into one day. But yeah, there definitely is some relationship between deep restorative sleep and deep restorative meditation.
Kelly: Yeah, I think there are some monks that don't even sleep at all. I mean extreme yoga, they are meditating while they sleep. Maybe they get a few hours of sleep a night but they are in another state. Hey, are you familiar with Richard Davidson's work?
Sarah: Oh, sure.
Kelly: Yeah, be interesting for you to kind of connect with him at some point.
Sarah: Yeah, it would be great. It would be good to have the Dali Lama nap.


[laughter]
Sarah: That would be fun.
Kelly: Sarah, lets talk about brain wave patterns. Could you walk us through the building blocks of sleep?
Sarah: Sure.
Kelly: Because I think it's very interesting for people to know if they are wondering how to create their nap schedule and what a nap feels like. It would be great to go through it.
Sarah: In the beginning of the show I talked a little bit about the different stages of sleep. And what happens is when you are just going into that relaxation, first relaxation. You are getting into alpha waves. This is common also for people who are meditating. They experience a lot of alpha waves. And that is a good wave to be able to, in biofeedback they always train people how to increase their alpha waves in order to get into a deep relaxation state.


And then once you start to get into a deeper, deeper sleep you are getting into a stage two sleep, as I said, which is good for alertness and motor performance. And in stage two you get things called spindles which are very, very high frequency waveforms and you also have these k complexes which are very slow waveforms actually. And you are beginning to get deeper and deeper into a slower state of the brain where the electrical activity of the brain is actually going at a much slower pace.
Kelly: Is this the theta state? Or are we already at delta?
Sarah: Yes, we are actually getting into delta when we are getting into deeper slower sleep. It's a slow wave sleep you are getting in delta.
Kelly: But in the area that you are talking about with spindles and K complexes?
Sarah: That one is basically, there's alpha, a little bit of theta, a little bit of gamma, it's kind of a mix. And then there is the spindles and the k complexes. It's kind of the least understood stage of sleep as of now. They used to think that it was just an interim between slow wave sleep and REM but now they are realizing that it has all these new qualities to it that are important for memory processing.


And then you get into the delta sleep actually, which is very slow electrical responses that are uniform across the whole brain. So the whole brain is synchronizing to a super slow beat.


And then as you're spending enough time in delta slow wave sleep, then you start to pass right out of that into a higher state of sleep again, a faster state of sleep which is again stage 2. And then you go into REM sleep which has, what you were talking about Theta, which is a faster and has been shown to do with different kinds of learning and creativity. And then you pass up into waking. We have beta and gamma and all different kinds of wave forms going on there.
Kelly: So when somebody is planning on taking a nap how long do you expect to be in each on of these stages? A beginner, a beginner napper.
Sarah: A beginner napper will go for, if you think of the whole cycle of going through all the different stages, that lasts about 90 minutes and the first 20 minutes are going to be Stage 2.
Kelly: That's beyond alpha?
Sarah: Mmmhmm, mmmhmm. And then the next between 20 and 50 minutes is going to be slowwave sleep, that's delta. And then between 50 and 90 minutes you are going to have more REM sleep. And then once you cycle out of REM sleep, then you're going to go start another cycle. And research has shown that you really don't need more than one cycle of sleep. If you pass through all the different stages, it's actually just overkill to sleep longer than an hour and a half.
Kelly: Because then you're groggy and you stay up all night, right?
Sarah: Yeah, you oversleep, exactly, and you're not getting any more benefits than just one having one good sleep cycle.
Kelly: So for a beginner napper, you basically recommend to set aside 90 minutes and set the alarm. [laughs]
Sarah: For beginning nappers, sometimes I even just say try 40 minutes, 20 minutes of those you might actually get to sleep. But just try setting aside 40 minutes of your day to lie down either on your couch at work, or on the floor at your office, or in your car, or if you actually can get home, and you can take a nap in your bed, or on the couch at home, any of these kinds of things where you are going to feel comfortable. Another aspect that you want is low light, because light can inhibit sleep. Also, if you are prone to getting cold when you fall asleep, which does happen because your temperature does decrease when you go to sleep, you might want a blanket. And then also you have to make sure that your body is well supported, that your posture is taken care of, because you will go limp when you go to sleep. And then just give yourself a 40minute period to just go into a relaxed state, and whether or not you actually fall asleep the first few times doesn't really matter. You may actually be sleeping and not realize it, because a lot of when people are in stage two sleep, they actually feel that they are not asleep. They feel like they are actually aware of what is going on around them, they can hear things, they can sort of sense the passing of time, and hear their own thoughts. But you will notice as well that you are not really moving while you are in that state. So that means that you probably are sleeping. But don't get too upset about sleeping or not sleeping. Just try to train yourself to just start to relax.
Kelly: Which is a challenge for a lot of people. [laughs]
Sarah: Mmhmm. Exactly.
Kelly: When you did your studies, and you had your guinea pigs, your subjects in the lab, were these people that were good at napping, or did you take just regular folks?
Sarah: Yep, I just had regular folks. I asked them only afterwards, "Do you nap?" and most people, it was like half and half, some people napped, some people didn't. I wanted to make sure I was just getting just a general population.
Kelly: And the people that weren't regular nappers, how long did it take for them to get into the rhythm of napping?
Sarah: Well, I only testing them twice in napping, and I actually never really had any problems with people not sleeping. You know, people always said, "How did you get your subjects to fall asleep?"
Kelly: Exactly. In a lab, with electrodes attached to their heads?
Sarah: Attached to their heads? Exactly. You know, what's amazing is we actually... The only thing we did was to ask them to not have any caffeine that day.
Kelly: Now, that's smart.
Sarah: Yeah, and that really did help a lot of people be tired when they really were supposed to be tired. But also, when you are given an opportunity to take a nap in a sleep lab, a lot of people who say they are insomniacs, they can't sleep at home. But if you put them into a sleep lab, they'll sleep like babies. And I think it's because that there's an association, it's more of a psychological block around sleeping as opposed to actually a biological block. I mean, there are people who definitely have actual insomnia, where they just cannot get to sleep in any position at all. But some people just really have some problems relaxing. So if you give them an opportunity to, and you pay them, [laughs] that also helps.
Kelly: That helps, too. [laughs]
Sarah: Yeah.
Kelly: So, before you were talking about the Kcomplexes and spindles, and in your book you mentioned longterm potentiation.
Sarah: Mmhmm.
Kelly: Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Sarah: Sure. So research looking at how... what is memory, how do we even call something a memory? And if you want to think about it in terms of neuroscience, what that means is that little bits of information are being transferred between neurons in the brain. And different parts of the brain are specified for different kinds of information. So say, in the visual areas, you will have visual information getting passed in between neurons. And the way that we refer... when we say learning or memory, what we mean is that those neurons that are passing information, say, about a red car. Oh yeah, my car is red, and you have to remember your car is red. Those are two different bits of information. Your neurons will fire together whenever your red car will show up, and that means there is an electrical signal that is being passed between those two neurons. One is for red and one is for your car. And whenever that car happens to be there, your neurons will say, "Oh my red car, my red car," and will fire together and that means that those neurons are potentiated Now...
Kelly: What is it, neurons that fire together wire together?
Sarah: Exactly, exactly. So each time that you actually see your red car, those neurons are firing together, and that means that they are getting wired together. And what's been found is that certain kinds of longterm memories may actually require very intense electrical stimulation to really get soldered together, if you want to think about it in terms of actual engineering wiring.
Kelly: So what do you mean by that? How would that play out in real life?
Sarah: That's just that the connections between these two neurons is able to, ah, the information is able to move faster, and these neurons now recognize each other as being part of a network around a memory. So whenever you see something or think about something, you are exciting a network of neurons that hold that information together.
Kelly: So, like, associations?
Sarah: Mmhmm. Exactly.
Kelly: OK, OK. And sleep helps with the whole longterm potentiation process?
Sarah: Exactly. So the electrical signals that are occurring during sleep, it's thought that those are actually helping you transfer information between neurons, hold and consolidate memories, transfer them from shortterm memory storage areas to longterm memory storage areas. You process your emotional memories through sleep. All of this is most likely going through some sort of process that is similar to longterm potentiation.
Kelly: Interesting. Have you ever done any work with lucid dreaming?
Sarah: No, I haven't, and people ask me that, and I do think it's... I've experienced it myself before, and it's a very interesting process, but I don't really know of any research that looks into lucid dreaming, and say, something like memory and anything like that.
Kelly: Mmhmm, mmhmm. In your book, you talk about longterm depression?
Sarah: Mmhmm.
Kelly: LTD? Can you explain that?
Sarah: Well, in the same way that we actually need longterm potentiation to excite neurons so that, they can, as you said, fire together, and therefore, wire together. The opposite is also true, that we have a lot of information that we take into our brain that we actually maybe don't want to remember, that we don't really want to have potentiated. So what you want is then the opposite system, which is a longterm depression. It allows your brain to actually loosen some of those bonds between neurons so that you cannot retain every single piece of information that comes across your brain.
Kelly: So it's our automatic blockingout system. [laughs]
Sarah: Mmhmm. Exactly.
Kelly: OK. In what stage of sleep does that occur in?
Sarah: These are usually in slowwave sleep.
Kelly: And longterm potentiation is in REM? Or in theta?
Sarah: That is more in REM, and also in stage two.
Kelly: And could you tell us more about REM? Because that's always such a fascinating subject.
Sarah: Mmhmm. So in REM sleep, it's actually a very, very active stage of sleep. Your heart rate increases, your blood flow increases, the temperature in your brain increases, and you are going through a lot of... the firing in your brain is also increasing, lots of areas of your brain are turning on, whereas they had been basically turned off during slow wave sleep. And what's also happening is that you're dreaming. You're having these very vivid dreams. The benefit of REM sleep actually is that you're also paralyzed because if you're not paralyzed you might be acting out some of your dreams, and that can be a problem for some people.
Kelly: I saw a documentary on that. On people that are sleepwalkers and even attack people in their sleep.
Sarah: Yes. REM behavior disorders can be a really horrible problem for people. So, during REM sleep you're having a lot of activity, and actually sometimes you're more active than you are in waking. And then there's dreams. And who knows about dreams. It's a very hot topic for centuries now. People trying to figure out what we're doing, why we have dreams and it still is completely unknown.
Kelly: A mystery, but a wonderful thing if you remember them.
Sarah: Yes definitely. It can be very useful for trying to understand yourself and everything around you.
Kelly: What are you working on now? Are you continuing with this nap research?
Sarah: Yes, I do nap research. Right now I'm looking at comparing caffeine to napping, and looking to see whether, you know what we'd normally do instead of have a nap is we'd have a dose of caffeine. And instead of that I would say that people should be napping, but then you'd have to be able to explain that caffeine is not serving the same purpose as a nap.


What I have is people who are tested in the morning and half of them are getting a nap and half of them are getting a dose of caffeine. Then they get retested in the afternoon.
Kelly: What's happening? What kind of results are you getting?
Sarah: The people who have the caffeine are actually showing decreases in all the different performance measures that I have while the nappers are showing increases.
Kelly: Uhoh, Starbucks had better get cots.
Sarah: Exactly. It's funny actually when I was in Denver I saw my first 24 hour Starbucks, that's the wave of the future.
Kelly: So your research is revealing that people that don't nap and drink caffeine are losing cognitive benefits throughout the day whereas people who nap are better.
Sarah: Yes. You can understand why people drink coffee, because you get a buzz. But that buzz doesn't translate into better mental performance.
Kelly: Interesting. Well, how does one design the perfect nap? You have a nap wheel on your book. And I haven't quite figured that out yet.
Sarah: OK. So "Take A Nap Change Your Life" is tying to help people not only just get to sleep in the nap, but also you can tailor your nap to suit your specific needs. So, as I went over the different stages of sleep and what the different benefits are, some of you might have said, "Oh that benefit Motor memory, seems like something I would do since I'm a dancer, or I am often typing or any of these things." Somebody who's in advertising or an artist or somebody who works in creative skills may decide I should have more REM sleep. And people can actually then find out, because the stages of sleep vary across the day, you're going to have more REM sleep in the morning.
Kelly: OK. You're going to have to go over this again. REM would help with?
Sarah: REM helps with creativity. It helps with perceptual skills. Such as visual skills, auditory skills.
Kelly: So that would be great for an artist?
Sarah: Great for an artist. Great for anybody like a radiologist. Somebody who uses their visual skills. A musician who's learning to listen to different kinds of music. Anybody who uses their sensory skills for their career. That would be good for REM sleep.
Kelly: So what time of day is that?
Sarah: The height of REM sleep interestingly enough is 9am, but most people wouldn't be napping at 9am. So usually if you have a nap around 11am, 11:30, or noon even your nap will have more REM sleep. But if you nap somewhere between two and three and four o'clock your nap will definitely have more slow wave sleep. And this really does vary depending on what time you woke up.


So the nap wheel on the cover of "Take A Nap." You have a wheel where you can set the wheel for whatever time you woke up. Then you can put down the hours of the day from whatever you woke up and you can see what hour of the day you're going to be napping. And you can see what hour of the day you're going to be napping and how much of that nap will have slow wave sleep and how much will have REM sleep.
Kelly: OK so I woke up say six o'clock and I want to have a REM nap.
Sarah: You could be napping any time between eleven, or even ten, and twelve noon and you'd have a nap that would have a lot of REM sleep in it.
Kelly: I don't know if I could do that. I don't know if I could put my computer away and shut down the studio.
Sarah: Yes, you'd have to definitely find more than a few minutes. You'd have to get into a nap of at least forty minutes in order to get that kind of REM sleep too.
Kelly: And if I slept in the afternoon?
Sarah: You're nap would have more slow wave sleep. It's a very restorative sleep good for muscle restoration, for clearing your mind, spatial memory.
Kelly: Creativity I would imagine too.
Sarah: Yes, creativity as well. But mostly creativity has been shown to be inspired by REM sleep.
Kelly: And athletes. That would be slow wave sleep.
Sarah: That's slow wave sleep and also stage two sleep. So a later in the afternoon naps. And a lot of athletes, if you speak to them, who are nappers, a lot of them will be napping later in the afternoon, in fact, very naturally. People naturally find the time that they should be napping, but the nap wheel is also for people who want to do a bit more strategic, precise napping.
Kelly: Perfect. Are there any other tips you'd like to give us on napping?
Sarah: We also have a sixteenstep relaxation exercise that has been shown to help insomniacs get to sleep in clinical trials. It can be used for your daytime sleep and nocturnal sleep, in case you have any issues around getting to sleep. There are lots of different tips. I also have a website called takeanap.info where a lot of this information can be checked out. And the nap wheel is there, that you can use your mouth to turn the nap wheel around.
Kelly: Beautiful. Are there any final words of advise that you'd like to leave us with on how wonderful napping is?
Sarah: Yes. I encourage people always to get to know their sleep better and to help themselves by being more conscious of getting enough sleep and testing out how napping can supplement their busy schedules.
Kelly: Well Sarah, it's been wonderful having you on the show.
Sarah: Thank you very much.
Kelly: What's your website?
Sarah: takeanap.info.
Kelly: That was Dr. Sarah Mednick. Again, her website is takeanap.info.


On our next episode of Theatre of the Mind, we'll be speaking with Dr. Candice Pert about how our minds are wired to feel bliss because I want to know how to feel more bliss. Dr. Pert was featured in the movie "What The Bleep Do We Know." She is author of two great books "Molecules of Emotion" and "What You Need To Know To Feel God." She's most famous for her groundbreaking discovery of the opiate receptor. Until next time try and fit a nap in your schedule and be well.