Motivation on the Run

Any time a story tells me to take more naps, it has my interest. I’m all for more naps. In fact, as I gracefully age, I look forward to my weekend naps with relish.

This article confirms several things I have thought for some time and adds new information along the way.

First, that our natural inclination is to take an afternoon nap, and second that the industrial age was the cause for the ceasing of the American afternoon nap. Also of the importance of the nap for stress relief. Now when you start to feel all stressed out, stop and take a nap.

Naps can pay back sleep-debt, alleviate stress | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

Right there, near the top of the best-known Christmas poem ever, the craving that cuts across all holiday traditions takes hold:

And mamma in her ‘kerchief and I in my cap

Had just settled down for a long winter’s nap.

Ah, yes. A nap. A warm little cup of sleep.

Most of us use the holidays to catch up on sleep we’ve lost the rest of the year. And since December is all about heaping on additional stress — shopping, in-laws, 14 different types of cookies that must be made or the world as we know it will cease to have meaning — our bodies end up aching for some shut-eye.

“We’re biologically programmed to take a nap in midafternoon,” says Max Hirshkowitz, an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine who also directs the Sleep Center at Houston’s Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center. “It’s the Industrial Revolution that separated us from siesta, because it was too expensive to shut down big machines in the middle of the day and turn them back on.”

[tags]motivation, stress, afternoon naps[/tags]