For all the brain benefits, you won’t catch me napping
New research should lift the moral opprobrium that sometimes attaches to the daytime snooze © Universal History Archive/Getty ImagesI’ve never been able to nap. My occasional desultory attempts at achieving a northern European simulacrum of the siesta almost always end in frustration, after ten minutes or so lying down rigidly and willing myself, unsuccessfully, into unconsciousness. So new research published this week by a team at University College London and the University of the Republic in Uruguay hit me like a hammer blow.
The paper, which appeared in the journal Sleep Health, found a “modest causal link between habitual napping and larger total brain volume”. On average, the researchers discovered, the difference in brain size between habitual nappers and non-nappers like me was equivalent to between 2.6 and 6.5 years in ageing. Regular napping, it seems, could “protect against neurodegeneration by compensating for deficient sleep”.
Prof Tara Spires-Jones, president of the British Neuroscience Association, suggested the research should lift the moral opprobrium that sometimes attaches to the daytime snooze. “I enjoy short naps on the weekends,” she said. “This study has convinced me that I shouldn’t feel lazy napping; it may even be protecting my brain.”
Interestingly, though, one of the study’s authors, Victoria Garfield, is not a napping enthusiast. “Honestly, I would rather spend 30 minutes exercising than napping,” she told the BBC. Indeed, a paper published in The Journal of Physiology in January this year found that high-intensity exercise, notably cycling, has “potent neuroprotective effects” similar to those being claimed for frequent napping. Welcome news for those of us who are much happier in the saddle than stretched out on a chaise longue.
It is also worth noting that the UCL study observed no notable differences in other measures of brain health and cognitive function — including reaction time and visual processing — between nappers and non-nappers. And, perhaps most significant of all, the comparison on which the whole thing was based was not between those who elect to nap and those who don’t, but rather between people who are genetically predisposed to do so and those who aren’t. In other words, some of us, however hard we try to snatch some diurnal shut-eye, will always be defeated by our genes.
So whether you are a napper or a non-napper has nothing to do with the content of your character or the strength of your willpower. It is just a brute physiological fact.
However, this did not stop the French philosopher Thierry Paquot once devoting a treatise to the “art of the siesta”, a practice he describes as a “high point in an art of living . . . that should be defended, popularised and practised with both joy and solemnity”.
The siesta (or, more prosaically, the nap) is, Paquot argues, an “act of resistance” against the tyranny of everything that is “obligatory, habitual and mechanical”. The implication of Paquot’s argument, which draws on The Right to be Lazy, a pamphlet published in the 1880s by Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, is that those who can’t or won’t nap in the middle of the day are merely dupes of what he calls the “disciplinary timetable” of capitalism.
I bristle at that conclusion. But then Paquot’s definition of the siesta is reassuringly expansive. It can, he says, “be practised in a thousand and one ways: either by falling into a heavy sleep, dozing for a handful of minutes or by emptying one’s mind for a few seconds”.
In fact, he concludes that the siesta is best understood as a “metaphor” for our ability to “dictate the use of our own time”. It doesn’t actually have to involve falling asleep or dozing in the middle of the day at all — which really does put my mind at rest.
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This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Jonathan Derbyshire
