WHOOP Podcast - Naps: Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo discuss the physical and mental benefits to napping, the concept of sleep debt and how naps help offset it, plus how to incorporate your activities & day strain into planning the timing and duration of your naps.

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

Your greatest recovery amplifier: Naps. Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo break down the value of napping on rest days (4:11), how naps maximize the quality of your training (7:03) and improve cognitive functioning (8:15), what you can gain from 3 minutes of slow wave sleep (9:23), why a 30-minute nap is only good sometimes (10:53) and why you should avoid napping for too long (12:50), the benefits of napping in between workouts (14:28), the napachino (15:10), the best time to sleep during the day (17:40), using WHOOP to manage sleep debt (23:14), avoiding binge sleeping (24:48), and tips to nap better (28:11). Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the Whoop podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. At WOOP, our clients range from the best professional athletes in the world to Navy SEALs to fitness enthusiasts to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone?

On this podcast, we dig deeper, we interview experts, we interview industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. How can you use data to improve your body? What should you change about your life? My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the Whoop Podcast. Hello again, Kristen Holmes here, VP of Performance Science and with me today, Director of Data Science and Research, Emily Capital Lupo. Hi, Kristen. I really hope you guys are not getting sick of us out there, whoop listeners.

Whether you like it or not, you're stuck with us for today. we are going to continue the January theme of Restolutions by taking a deep dive into naps. So we all know sleep experts out there would agree with a statement that consolidated sleep is ideal, but there are so many occasions in our life when getting all the sleep we need might not be possible or we simply need a little energy boost, right, Emily? Exactly. Enter the greatest recovery amplifier, naps.

Okay, we're going to start off by laying some groundwork on how naps can help support both physical and cognitive recovery. Research shows a short nap following a short night's sleep, improved sprint times. Emily, what's your take on how highly varied physiological triggers like a VO2 max versus a lactic acid tolerance type like a tabata versus explosive strength might lead to different recovery requirements? Sure.

So basically, the way that we stress our bodies will determine how we need to recover. And so we need a different type of recovery if we did sort of like steady state endurance work, which sort of can deplete glycogen but doesn't necessarily, you know, create any skeletal or muscular damage versus if we do something really, really intense and super short, we probably actually didn't deplete that much glycogen because it was short, but we put a lot of load on our musculoskeletal system, and so we're going to need musculoskeletal recovery after them. Right, which is just, it's more taxing on the body. Yeah, and it's a different stimulus.

So, you know, based on your experience, these different things, the sort of relative amount of taxation that you get from them can change. So somebody who, like, you know, is an endurance runner and does this all the time. One of the things they're actually getting good at is recovering from endurance activity as well. There's an economy associated to that. Yeah, right. So it's like we get good. Yeah, we get efficient at handling the types of stress that we tend to give our bodies.

And that's why sort of cross training is so encouraged, right? You, like, create these alternative stimuli and sort of stress your body in new ways. And that can lead to growth from, like, you know, supportive systems. do you think it's safe to say if you are doing an activity that you haven't done before I mean your body is you're going to probably feel it right so if I go out and play a basketball game for example and I haven't played basketball forever I'm probably going to be a little sore next the next day like you know you need to build in probably kind of across the board if you're doing it if you're entering a new stimulus it would you'll probably require a little bit more recovery yeah absolutely just kind of think and plan for that and build it in yeah I mean unless it's something like that's just another version of what you do like if you typically you know, road bike all the time, and then you take a spin class that's not actually different. Let's talk about rest days real quick, because, you know, I think we're always focused on, you know, how to think about napping in the context, you know, of post-recovery or if we've got two, like, directly after an athletic event or a workout or if we've got two sessions, you know,

we think about naping. But what about on rest days? I think there's, there's quite a bit of research, too, that in Dr. Amy Bender, I think we cited her potentially in the last podcast. She's done just awesome work around this but you know she always recommends a two-hour nap to support recovery um especially for you know endurance athletes with greater training volumes but on on the rest days and we definitely seen the data that on that's where you can really maximize recovery obviously is is thinking about your rest days in the context of your strain keeping it low um so you can really you know get after it the following day just kind of talk through how that works on the whoop system and just generally sure so i mean like there's still only 24 hours in every day right so if a rest day means

that you're not spending 90 minutes working out, then that becomes 90 minutes that you can put towards something really active of recovery. So, like potentially taking a nap. The way sleep debt works is that, you know, it follows you around for a few days. And so if you're sort of reaching this rest day and you're not 100% sleep replete, taking that opportunity to not just merely not work out, but to sort of really take that time that would otherwise be allocated to working out and put that towards sleep so that you leave your rest day completely. caught up on sleep you're now that much more ready to perform on your next on day and so yeah so it's kind of like you know since since you can't add more time you can't always do like a four hour nap

and a four hour workout and have a full-time job and kids and a whole life right so it's like you can kind of use that opportunity of like your workout time yeah for extra sleep and you're going to get like that much more out of it yeah and and in terms of the whoop system just keeping her strain low yeah on those on those days and using, you know, it builds in real time. So there's a great opportunity to actually kind of keep track of of your strain as the day goes. Yeah. So that it goes on. Right. So you really want to kind of minimize the external load that you're putting on your body on a rest day so that it's a true rest day and not merely like I didn't go to the gym today, but I like use that opportunity to clean the garage and like do all these things.

And I was on my feet all day running around because then it's like, yeah, you didn't go to the gym. So you probably didn't create like a really positive adaptive training stimulus, but you still stressed your body out. You still have all these recovery needs. And so then you're not going to go into the next workout sort of looking like somebody who's recovered. And we actually see this a lot with our athletes, especially collegiate athletes, because they're so busy. And they sort of, they get a day off and like, that's time to go socialize with their friends. Yeah. Just doing like you're lugging like 30 pounds of, you know, clothes up and downstairs and like all this stuff. And, you know, we get that you're busy and like you want to take advantage of that time. But, you know, what we found is that

our athletes who really keep their strain low and we're talking like, you know, under six. on a rest day they're just their recovery rebound so much more and then they're able to perform at a much higher level and create that larger training stimulus when they're back to training days it's just all about being available you know and kind of setting your targets up so you can you can repeat effort and with with quality and efficiency because the more recovered you are going into a workout the more fitness gain that same workout is going to give you so like the amount of fitness gain you get from a workout is only partially related to the intensity of the workout it's also very highly related to your body's ability to action that training stimulus. And so,

like, if you're going to do all the work, you want to maximize the gains. You might as well take that opportunity on your recovery day to, like, really set yourself up for that return on an workout investment. Yeah. I think, too, if you have a, it's maybe worth noting, like, if you have a hard workout, you know, especially if maybe a hard weight session, I find if I, if I do a hard weight session, I don't sleep quite as well, which I know is a little counterproductive in the sense that I want to be, you know, getting as much slowly sleep as possible to really capitalize on the workout. But I do notice my sleep is a little bit more fragmented coming off of hard workouts. So again, I think that nap can really can really help and, you know, amplify recovery and

yeah, can help make up for something like that. And then also like sort of give you that opportunity since you didn't have a hard workout on a rest day, you're more likely to sleep well that night. Right, right. Cool. Let's shift and just talk about so kind of those naps in the context of, you know, performance. And let's talk about naps in terms of cognitive functioning. Sure. So naps can definitely reduce sleepiness and improve cognitive performance. We kind of know this.

The benefits of brief kind of five to 15 minute naps are almost immediate after the nap and last a limited period, one to three hours. Longer naps, on the other hand, like 30 minutes plus, can produce, actually can produce impairment from sleep inertia, which I think Emily is just a fancy word for groginess, right? for a short period after waking, but then produce improved cognitive performance for a longer period up to many hours. And we'll link to some of the research around that. Emily, why don't you go through just a quick list of how naps can kind of impact performance on the job? Sure. So in order to answer that question, you kind of have to understand the anatomy of a nap a little bit. So in our

podcast last week, we talked about sort of different sleep stages and specifically like where in the night those tend to show up. So, you know, we talked about how you get slow wave sleep early in the night. And then you get REM sleep later in the night. And this actually applies to naps as well. And so typically if you just nap for, say, like, less than five minutes, you probably didn't get any slow wave sleep or any REM sleep. And there was actually a study done in 2005, published in the journal Sleep by this guy, Tato Horry. And he showed that if you don't get three minutes of slow wave sleep,

there's actually no cognitive benefit to the nap. So it's probably just like, you know, there's some rest benefit and you're not accruing strain and it might be, you know, just like a nice moment to re-center, but it didn't show any benefit relative to like the control group. Interesting. But if they got at least three minutes of slow wave sleep, they showed cognitive performance improvements after that. And so if you're kind of only have enough time to get asleep for a couple of minutes, you know, it actually might not be that effective to use that time for a nap. You might be better off to incorporating like mindfulness or. meditation.

Yeah. Some passive breathing. And, you know, sometimes it's really how pools are just like, you know, take a quiet moment, put your feet up, you know, kind of regroup. And all of that's going to have benefits, but, you know, you're not going to get sleep related benefits from that. Right. Although it will impact potentially, if you build in those many moments of rest throughout

the day, we do see that impact onset and efficiency. Yeah. The following. So it does, it kind of have that type of benefit. Yeah. So I thought that was really interesting. So those are these like kind of ultra short. naps that the goal is to get at least three minutes of slowly sleep. Now typically you're just

talking about the distribution of sleep stages, you're not going to get into REM sleep unless your nap is at least 90 minutes. And obviously that varies from person to person. But there's a really interesting study done by William Fishbine in 2006 and published in the journal Neurobiology of learning and memory. And he showed that if you don't get any REM sleep in your nap, that that nap, but you do get slow wave sleep, that that nap will improve procedural memory tasks, but won't improve declarative memory tasks. So that's the difference between like if I give you a little puzzle and you have to figure out how to do it, that's procedural memory.

So it's like that muscle memory versus like if I ask you to know or you know repeat back 10 digits to me or something like that. Can you repeat that back? So that's procedural versus declarative memory. If I ask you to like remember six words, you know, can you repeat those words back to me? What this really teaches us, which is I think such an interesting study is that one it's more complicated than just the duration of the nap. It's sort of what you actually

achieve in the nap. Yeah. And it means that the utility of the nap and how like much better performance will be really depends on the form of performance that happens to be important to you today. So if you only have 30 minutes, but you're trying to improve your declarative memory, you know, you're going to be, say, interviewed and you really want to be on your game to like remember all these facts or something like that. 30 minutes probably not going to help you. You're not going to get any REM sleep. But if you're, a tennis player and you know it's that muscle memory to put that little ball right in the you know right in the corner of the box and you know perfect serve 30 minutes can be great because you're going to get some slow wave sleep you get a little you know that kind of recovery and so a tennis player is going to see a noticeable performance benefit from a 30 minute nap and you know like a professor or someone being interviewed or anything like that is like not going to feel it as much you kind of have to know what you're trying to get out of the now I guess in both cases you might end up less sleepy so that's a good thing but so yeah so there's a big difference kind of minimum you definitely want to

get three minutes of slow wave sleep if you kind of care about declarative memory you probably want to plan to get at least 90 and what we really tell people is you probably don't want to get too much more than like two to three hours at like the most because what starts to happen when you nap is that you're almost like going to pay for it later when you go to sleep like you take too much sleep pressure off and then when you try and go to bed that night like back at normal time you're not tired enough you kind of disturb your circadian rhythm by doing that and you relieve too much homeostatic pressure for sleep and so then you end up having like you know a little bit of insomnia or it's like harder to fall asleep and then if you take an extra hour to fall asleep then it's like

you basically wasted like you kind of undoes the benefit of the nap and so now you sort of wake up the next morning more or less in the same position that you would have been right you're not napped so you want to think about especially if you're napping, you know, the closer to bedtime you're napping, the shorter that nap should be. So if you nap, we'll talk about that. Yeah. So it's like if you're, you know, you can probably take a longer nap. Let's say for whatever reason you woke up at 4 a.m. to do something.

And then at like 4.30 you can go back to bed. Like, yeah, then you can sleep till 8 and you're probably not going to interfere with your sleep that night. Right. But I wouldn't recommend taking like that three and a half hour nap in the afternoon. And just as a general rule of thumb, you know, most adults, generally are not going to feel sleepy during the day if they're meeting their sleeping at night, right?

I mean, that's kind of a good rule of thumb. If you find yourself sleepy during the day, for the most part, I think that's a good indication that you're not actually getting the sleep that you need at night to fully restore. For sure. So we're sort of talking about, I guess, naps being recommended in a case where for whatever reason you couldn't get the sleep you need last night.

And I also think there's a lot of utility for, you know, high-level athletes who are working out twice a day. Definitely, yeah. Because if you can hit slow-wave sleep between those two workouts, you're going to produce human growth hormone and you're going to start the recovery process from that first workout before the second workout like if you nap between them and so then you're going into the second workout sort of more more recovered than you otherwise would and so kind of more ready again to like action the training stimulus of the second workout so you'll probably get more out of it um so those athletes might not necessarily feel sleepy but kind of might strategically nap in order to get that growth hormone boost right um but yeah i agree like if you're just sort of living your normal life and find that like you need a nap in the middle of the afternoon is probably a good indicator that you're not sleeping well at night. All right.

Let's talk about caffeine in naps. This is kind of a little bit more strategic, but I think it falls. There is some research around it. So I wanted to bring it up kind of in the, you know, as we talk through some of the research. So the nappuccino, practitioners seem to be a little mixed. You know, there's mixed opinions on this. Some say that you must be highly sleep deprived for this to be effective. I think we can kind of guess why they say that.

Because if you're not highly sleep deprived, I guess you won't fall asleep as fast, you know, to by the time the caffeine actually kicks in. So just what's your take? How should we actually think about this? Right. So for those of you who aren't familiar, the napuccino is this fun little trick where you basically kind of shoot an espresso shot, you know, some kind of strong caffeinated thing and then immediately go to sleep. So the idea is that it takes about 20, 25 minutes for the caffeine that you ingest to get into your bloodstream and to start. start making you feel all wired and energized. And so if you take a nap during that time, then the caffeine will naturally wake you up.

And so you get woken up by caffeine, which means you're not going to have that same like sleep inertia groginess feeling. And so you kind of get your nap in and then you sort of have this supported wake up process that makes it easier to transition out of the nap. Like you said, it's sort of one of those things is maybe a little bit easier said than done. Like, I think there's also a, like, a psychological effect to drinking coffee that makes us feel wired because we know that the chemical stimulants can, you know, arrive soon. You know, I, for one, like, most of the time can't just, like, fall asleep on a dime in the middle of the day. You have to kind of, one, be able to kind of knock back the coffee super quickly.

You can't savor it over the course of 20 minutes because then it's starting to hit your bloodshed. Yeah. So you kind of have to, like, just shoot it back, fall asleep and get asleep, you know, within a couple minutes. so that you get some slow-wave sleep by 20 minutes in when the caffeine starts to hit and we'll wake you up. So in theory, it's, you know, it's kind of sexy, but it's... So it's typically we see that people who are able to fall asleep, you know, on demand like that are either extremely sleep-deprived or like narcoleptic, which we all get into. But, yeah, it's not, it's not the easiest thing to pull off. Right.

Correctly. Yeah. Yeah. But a cool trick if you can. All right. So we're going to go into talking about just some of the principles and then weave in some of the tactics. So first, and we, which in this just a tiny bit, but duration and timing, I want to go a little bit deeper. So if you ever nap before, the research suggests, you know, napping midday between one and four, I'm like, just talk about this from the perspective of just circadian timing and, you know, why this is kind of an important place for folks to start, you know, just knowing kind of when to take a nap, you know, relative to their wake up time.

and if they're, they're chronotype too. You know, I think, you know, if they're going to, you know, if I generally feel sleepy around 11.30 p.m., then I could probably get away, you know, closer to that 4 p.m. You know, just kind of talk to the. So you're going to hear a lot of, like, if you Google, like when is the best time to nap, it'll say things like don't nap after 2 p.m.

But it's kind of a silly recommendation because it matters much more sort of when you plan to go to bed. Right. Then, like, like, what is 2 p.m., right? If you're a shift worker that might not even be anything. so you know you really want to think about like at least kind of you know six eight hours before bedtime so that you don't interfere with your sort of sleep pressure so there's this homeostatic which drive towards sort of sleep and wake and if you reduce sleep need too much during the day

and you don't have enough pressure towards sleep at bedtime it's going to be hard to fall asleep even if your circadian rhythm is sort of saying that it's sleep time. You also don't want to nap too early in the day because you can shift your circadian rhythm by doing that. Your body almost kind of treats it like you're sort of delaying the sleep from the night before. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So if you...

How close to wake up time would you, do you think that that effect? So it's interesting, right? Because like, sometimes it's hard to tell like what's a nap. First, it's like going back to bed, right? We know a lot with like parents of young children where people with new puppies might get up at 5 a.m. to kind of tend to their little ones. And then at 5.30 they're going back to it. So that's really going back to bed. That's not like being awake and then taking a nap. But if you're, if you're basically just like sort of, you know, you went to bed at 3 a.m. the night before.

And then you just sleep all the way through toward to like noon the next day or something like that. You're going to shift your circadian rhythm. And then when it's bedtime, your circadian rhythm sort of not going to be in the right spot right to promote sleep and so typically what we see is about two hours before when your circadian rhythm is anticipating bedtime we start to produce melaton and so if you're napping like early in the morning you can actually shift your circadian rhythm if you nap kind of at the midpoint between the previous wake and sleep the circadian shift effect is much smaller because it's almost like right in the middle so you're like equally pushing it forward and pulling it back and so you don't shift your circadian rhythm as much but you

you will mess with the homeostatic drive towards sleep that night if you nap for too long. So, like, basically six, seven hours after you wake, essentially. Yeah, like that midpoint. So if you're sort of roughly awake for 16 to 18 hours, something like that, then, yeah, it's something like eight hours after you wake up. So the night owls are going to do better with a later nap, and the larks are going to do better with an earlier nap. Right. So if your normal bedtime's 8 p.m., then, like, the 2 p.m. rule is going to be too late for you if your normal bedtime is too, AM then it's too conservative for you. So you want to think about kind of what they mean when

they're saying it's like almost like physiological 2 p.m. Not like true 2 p.m. Yeah. Not that makes sense. So yeah so kind of naps are this funny thing because obviously being sleep deprived is bad for us for so many reasons. And so it's like being not sleep deprived is better than being sleep deprived, you know, period end of sentence. But then there's there are better ways to be not sleep deprived. Right. So it's like a little bit better to like try and sleep in a half that hour later and try and go to bed a half hour earlier. And avoid the nap entirely. Yeah, and to avoid the nap, but that's not always practically feasible.

Right. And so if you are going to nap, there are ways that are sort of going to interfere, to minimize the interference with sort of your next sleep. Because what you really, really don't want to do is to, like, have your nap, harm your nighttime sleep such that it basically cancels it out. Right. And we definitely see, you know, napping after four o'clock, just hard. stop after four we see a decrease in sleep biological four yeah biological four right um we definitely

see a decrease in sleep quality yeah across our athletes and it's up to like 15 percent yeah so you see sleep like the early part of the night you'll get lower slow way of sleep um yeah more weight periods of that so yeah so that means you know if you're typically spending like 45 percent of your total time and and kind of these deeper stages and you nap later in the afternoon um you know you're going to spend basically like 30% of your total time in these deeper stages. So again, you're missing out on like 15%, which is just pretty massive. So sleeping is a skill, as we know. We've talked about that a fair amount. Napping is also a skill. You need to work to be good at it. So it really does take a fair amount of planning and preparation to kind of understand when to build it in, you know,

based on all the stuff that, you know, Elman and I've just been talking about in terms of timing and duration and all that. So a great place to start is certainly taking stock of how you feel. But also another way to think about it in the context of whoop is looking at your sleep debt to understand you know kind of the length of nap that might be appropriate you know and with a goal of course of managing sleep debt you definitely don't want sleep debt to kind of accumulate right like that's and that's where you know we see the athletes that we work with when you know athletes are accumulating huge amounts of sleep debt over the course of the season for example you know invariably they end up getting sick they get up you know end up getting injured so managing

sleep debt can be a really proactive way for every single human being to keep illness and injury burden in check. You know, if we may just talk about the app real quick, because I think some folks don't even know. So basically you just go into the app, you swipe left, and you get into the sleep performance page. You click on sleep needed. You will see this little box that says sleep debt.

The bright green number with the accompanying arrow, it will be red or green. And this will basically just tell you how much sleep debt you have. And the gray, of course, is your baseline. So how we use this number, how I think about it, how, you know, the athletes on our system think about it is basically you want to try to, you know, again, keep that sleep debt down by mapping a nap with your sleep debt. So if you have 40 minutes of sleep debt accumulated, a 30 minute nap makes sense. So with the

goal over time, you don't want your sleep debt to accumulate, you know, to get to a point where it's over 30 minutes. You know, that's kind of the standard across the collegiate and professional athletes that we work with. So it could be just, I think, a great way of, you know, for anyone who's on the system, a great way to use, you know, the app to kind of help direct behavior. And I think just the overall goal is just, you know, to be really proactive, understanding that, you know, when sleep debt creeps over time, it's invarially, you know, it's going to, it's going to bite you in the ass. And we really, we don't want to get in a position where, you know, we've accumulated all this sleep debt. We've got three hours of sleep debt. And now we're trying to binge sleep, you know,

So if I'm like, if you just want to talk real quick and, you know, this is getting outside of naps a little bit, but I think it's important for folks to understand what binge sleeping is and why that's not helpful. When we're sleep deprived, which means really when we have any amount of sleep debt, our body goes into some amount of like a low power mode. And it's sort of a lower power mode when we have more sleep debt and a sort of relatively less low power mode when our sleep debt's relatively small. But basically we sort of say like, well, I'm not, I don't have time. every night to do all the restorative things I need to do. And so I'm going to prioritize the like most important things. Some stuff won't get done. And so if you aren't constantly like sort of paying off that debt, that means you're constantly running in low power mode, which means like you're not. But you know, some of the things that go first are things like, you know,

maintaining a healthy microbiome in your gut, you know, growing your hair and nails, turning over your skin. It's like stuff that can like wait a day. It's like, you know, you're going to look more beautiful and feel better if it's happening, you know, to the full extent every single day. And so if you let the sleep debt accumulate so much and then binge sleep, you will in fact end up at the end of that sleep replete, but you had like a whole week or month or whatever where you were running in low power mode. So it's not like you don't go back in that time and like do a month worth of nail growth. You know, you're going to have brittle nails. So you might like stop doing more damage, but the damage is done.

You can almost think about it, like your credit score, right? Like, you know, if you don't pay all these bills and stuff like that, and then you, like, a year later, go pay off all that stuff, like, yeah, like, you're not in debt anymore, but like your credit card score still sucks. Yeah. Like, it kind of works the same way, right? Except instead of this credit score that's going to prevent you from getting a mortgage, we're talking about, like, your immune system didn't do things so you got more colds

as a result. Like, so catching up on sleep isn't going to undo the cold you had less. week. We don't regulate our appetite as well. So like you probably over ate and ate like poor food. So it's like none of that gets undone. It's just you stop doing more damage. And so the reason why and people do this a lot on like a shorter scale where they're like be relatively sleep deprived Monday to Friday and then they like binge sleep on the weekend. And it's like it's so much better to do that than to like not do the binge sleeping because you do end up getting back to zero. But like it'd be so much better to actually every single day like pay the full bill. you know, hit that break-even point of exactly your sleep need, you know, every single day so you don't spend any time in low power mode because that's really, you know, the things that are going to go really quickly are things like, hey, you had this exercise stimulus. I'm going to build your muscles up even stronger. Like that's going to go. Like that's going to be one of the first things that goes, right? Because as like building the muscles even stronger is going

to feel non-essential relative to like continue to like produce new blood and kidney function, all that kind of stuff which like we try and maintain as long as possible so and and i think to for you know for thinking about nap as a skill you know the same way we kind of approach our nighttime sleep with routines and and all the things that we talked about previously kind of want to think about the same thing uh it's those same things with with a nap you know you're gonna want to yeah to the extent that you're much higher level right because now you're fighting your circadian rhythm when you're trying to sleep at like a sort of odd time right yeah so it's like that said if you're feeling sleepy you're it's going to be a lot easier Sure. If you're kind of trying to force a nap, it's going to be more difficult to your point. But if you're already feeling sleepy and you want to capitalize on that, you know, cold, dark, you know, you want to try to create a scenario where you can really maximize the time frame that you have to take a nap. Yeah. And I think also like sort of enlisting the people in your life to help you a little bit. You know, tell your kids, leave me alone for 20 minutes or, you know, let people know not to bother you so that you can actually use the time and not get constantly disturbed at a time that maybe like your friends might expect you to be available.

you know, turning off your phone. It's like, you know, your friends know better than to call you at 3 a.m. Right. But at 3 p.m. you might feel totally fair game. Right. And when you wake up in the morning, if you know, all right, I definitely need to build in a nap today, probably don't have caffeine, you know, just kind of take, just, and we have just

some internal research that we've done. We've seen, you know, when you layer stimulants on a unrecovered system, like, that's not good if you're trying to recover tomorrow. You know, you kind of end up diverting resources to kind of deal with this, you know, with a stimulus with the stimulant so um you know kind of lay off the caffeine and then when you feel that natural pressure for you know where you when you start feel sleepy you know just have a nap you can kind of ease into it with some calming breaths you know as like little yeah things that you can do to kind of help um help yourself get into that zone where uh you're kind of cueing your body

okay time to yeah and if you have the opportunity um you know kind of bringing in elements of your normal nighttime routine like even putting on pajamas for 20 minutes like taking your work clothes off, getting really comfy, getting into bed. Dabba lavender oil. Oh, yeah. Okay, so we talked a lot about naps. Hopefully there's some good nuggets in there that you guys can take away. Emily, thanks for digging in on all the science around, you know, timing and duration

and just a lot of the research that was out there. We'll make sure we'd link to those in the show notes. Yeah, and if anybody, you know, wants to let us know how you incorporate naps into your recovery process and, you know, anything else you'd like to talk about on the podcast, certainly reach out. Thanks so much. Thank you. If you're not already a WOOP member, you can join our community for as low as $30 to begin.

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