If you enjoy taking naps, we’ve got great news for you: napping has actually been tied to boosts in cognitive function. This is to be expected whether you’re a teenager, an adult, or even in your older years. Napping can actually provide plenty of benefits aside from helping us catch up on sleep or taking a minute to rest and recover after a hard workout. In this article, we’re going to dive into just a few of these essential cognitive benefits and why napping can assist your learning.
As you’ll discover, napping benefits learning because it can help us with our memory consolidation, enhanced focus and attention, and even allow us to become more creative, especially when it comes to problem-solving. Let’s explore how napping helps with memory consolidation first and why this is so important to your learning.
Improves Memory Consolidation
Much like how sleeping can help us rest, recover, and improve our immune systems, napping can also help us improve our memory consolidation. This is a critical part of learning, as without any coded memories about what you learned, how will you be able to remember it later? Recent studies have shown that memory consolidation happens during napping because non-REM sleep has been associated with memory consolidation, showing that you don’t need to enter REM sleep to experience these benefits (Source: Sleep).
In other words, if you catch yourself a short nap, you will still be able to benefit from memory consolidation, which helps you learn and code items to memory. However, other studies also show how daytime napping can actually help with declarative memory. Just like memory consolidation happens during non-REM sleep, regular nappers will benefit from improved declarative memory, which is the recollection of facts and events. Simply put, you’ll be able to remember more facts, share specific details, and demonstrate that you coded your recently learned material to your memory (Source: ScienceDirect).
The duration of your nap doesn’t matter either. Whether you take a ten-minute nap or nap for an hour, you’ll still experience this benefit. Yet, we also have to explore how napping can allow you to enhance your focus and attention when learning.
Enhances Focus and Attention
Have you ever struggled to get sleep the night before, sat through a class or meeting, and then felt like you missed everything that was discussed? There’s a reason for this, and it’s actually what you might expect. When you are drowsy or find yourself feeling more tired than usual, you might suffer from attention lapses and a lack of focus. People who take regular naps can avoid these lapses in attention or the inability to focus, allowing them to learn more effectively than others.
A study on napping and how it impacted performance—both in regards to cognitive and psychomotor performance—demonstrated that those who napped experienced better performance and attention to detail as compared to others who did not (Source: Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience). Essentially, what this means is that if you need a nap, you should definitely take one! This can help you overcome the immediate drowsiness you might feel, and it can also increase your ability to focus and pay attention in class or in your meeting.
Napping can definitely improve your ability to focus, but did you know it can also help you be more creative while learning?
Allows for More Creativity and Problem-Solving
In specific educational environments, creativity and effective problem-solving are paramount. Fortunately, napping can allow you to become more creative, significantly when you are solving an issue or need an innovative solution. Many people think that creativity and problem-solving might only be solved when people have entered REM sleep, but that isn’t the case. One of the earliest stages of sleep, the N1 sleep stage, takes place during non-REM sleep, and it has been labeled “the creative sweet spot”.
This means that non-REM sleep can actually activate more creativity in the mind, which aids in learning and problem-solving. This specific study showed that those who had to solve mathematical problems were more creative if they had experienced the N1 sleep stage before they were presented with the problem. Whether you’re solving mathematical problems or trying to configure a solution for your company’s initiatives, taking a nap might just be the right choice to help you learn, overcome challenges, and discover newfound solutions to seemingly troublesome dilemmas.
Optimizes Your Learning Potential
Napping is tied to learning because it can optimize your overall performance, but especially your learning potential. Several studies have shown that a 90-minute nap might be ideal for physical contests and performances, but the same can be said for cognitive performances, too. If you struggle with a lack of sleep, it’s even more critical for you to nap and ensure that you’re getting enough rest so you can effectively learn, apply, and grow.
People have also discovered that sleep can help those with learning impairments. Because of the combined benefits that we have expressed above, napping helps learning because it consolidates memories and makes you more creative. In reality, the combination of the above connections between napping and learning only further indicates that you are optimizing your brain for learning and maximizing your potential (Source: Sleep and Learning). So, if you’d like to enhance your chances of learning, don’t be afraid to grab a quick nap throughout the day to boost your cognitive function.
Enjoy Naps and Boost Your Cognitive Function
Napping is distinctly tied to learning because of what our brains are capable of while we sleep. Even in non-REM sleep, we see how napping can enhance our memory consolidation, focus, and attention and help us become more creative when we problem-solve. Furthermore, the combination of these effects only further shows how all of this maximizes our potential to learn, grow, and develop as individuals. Whether you’re a student or an adult looking to improve your cognition, the facts all point to naps being a game-changer for your learning!
