Health Benefits of Power Nap

Napping is recognized in two different perspective. The first one is napping as a compensation for a sleep deficit from the previous night while the second one is napping as a form of barrier that interferes with a night time sleep (Ji, 2018). Regardless of this conflict, a nap is taken as something that is meant for a preschooler to do, which is not true. In fact, naps contributes a significant effect in terms of alleviating an individual's stress as well as powering our cognitive functions particularly one's alertness (Dasgupta, 2018)

In line with Coulthard, 2017, a sufficient nap can lead to good decision-making.

This promotes cognitive functioning that is beneficial in making choices. Having an adequate nap is synonymous to having better choices.

On top of that, power nap can also lead to a massive headway in terms of emotion control. Happiness is significantly associated to nap. Moreover, increased in self-control and elevated verbal IQs which leads to a quality job performance are all enclosed in having a nap (Feng, 2019) Napping strengthens an individual to emotional control.

Get quality help now

WriterBelle

Verified writer

Proficient in: Health

4.7 (657)

“ Really polite, and a great writer! Task done as described and better, responded to all my questions promptly too! ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

Vulnerability from frustration is decreased to those people who take a nap which shows that taking a nap is as effective countermeasure against sleep deficit. Napping serves as protection against having negative emotions such as frustration and impulsivity (Goldschimied, et al, 2015).

Furthermore, power nap is not only limited to being connected to a heightened level of cognitive functions such as alertness and reaction time as well as to an increased of emotion control because it also has an impact in terms of an individual's immune system.

Napping is an effective way to maintain a healthy body especially in terms of the immune system of a person. A study involving 11 healthy your men were limited to only sleep for 2 hours for a night and found out that nap boost one's immune system. Having a nap boosts them as if they never had a sleepless night (Faraut et al,, 2016).

Power nap and cognitive functioning

Naps benefit the brain in facilitating memories, subsequent learning, and emotional processing. However, in spite of these benefits, it is also linked with negative outcomes, such as hypertension, cognitive decline and diabetes (Mantua & Spencer, 2016).

Ten to fifteen minutes of sleep is the ideal period in bettering mental operations, reaction time, performance, and alertness. Based on a study, this improvement is seemingly being maintained for up to two to three hours after the nap. On the other hand, the five-minute nap did not produce the same amount of enhancement. Longer naps of twenty five to thirty minutes led to drowsiness and reduced alertness for up to an hour after the nap. (Lack, 2018)

Another study has suggested that people who nap often have higher body mass index, more sleepy and are higher cumulative illness rating than those who seldom take naps. Longer naps results to poorer psychomotor speed, verbal memory and fluency. Negative effects of naps depends on their timing and duration. (Cross et al., 2015)

Further, nap in the middle of the day or what is refer to as siesta reduces sleepiness. In addition to that, it also benefits memory consolidation, learning ability, executive functioning, and emotional stability. (Mantua & Spencer, 2017) It was proved to help boost and restore brainpower. (Nichols, 2017)

As per Houda, 2018, a 30-minute nap enhances brain functioning. It also helps to overcome insufficiency in terms of one's cognition and physicality in performances caused by sleep deprivation.

Nap in performance improvement

Sleep is censorious complex for waking cognition and dynamic process that affects how people function that is to clearly think, to be alert, and to comfort attention. Memories are amassed during sleep, and that sleep serves a major role in emotional regulation. (Dinges,2018)

It has been reflected to Ji's experiment on 2018 that the range where nap is more effective is between 30 to 60 minutes. A nap that is longer than one hour intrudes into circadian rhythm. People who slept between 30 to 60 minutes produced effective and accuracy in attention tasks and faster speed as well. She proposed not to take a nap after 4p.m., nor over-nap

Effectiveness of power nap in exhaustion

Asian countries like Japan promotes taking a nap during their job. This is called 'inemuri,' which is a symbol of Japanese that they are dedicated to their work until they are exhausted. Sleep loss is believed to be a cause to reduced productivity in work and increased absenteeism. For this reason, Japanese encourage taking a nap at work to increase their daily sleep and prevent such events from happening (Brager, 2019).

In addition, a power nap is viewed as magical. This technique refreshes one's mind when an individual is feeling drowsy or exhausted and consequently promotes the quality of work as if an individual never had an inadequate sleep the previous night (Oppong, 2018).Not only can it provide a natural solution to sleep inadequacy but can also appease one's fatigue.

Power nap is reckoned as an effective strategy for fatigue management because it mitigates the occurrence of decreased quality of job perforance and the risk of having injury or errors performing a particular task during one's shift (Centofanti, 2016)

Power nap and sleep inadequacy

For shift workers like call center agents, it is of utmost importance that they consider napping as a tool against sleep loss since having an inadequate amount of sleep is rampant in the context of business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. Taking a power nap is a countermeasure against deficit from sleep. It can even make an individual less drowsy after shift when they drive home (Brown, 2016).)

Risks of power nap

A power nap also has its own disadvantage. One of which is that taking a nap can be a risk factor or a sign which is an indication of cardiovascular diseases, Parkinson's disease, and diabetes. Simply put, studies suggest that nap has an effect in terms of an individual's mortality (Stone, 2018).

More than this, those that are taking a nap is prone to sleep inertia, a phase of grogginess which affects an individual's job performance. Accordting to Hilditch CJ's study on 2017, it was reflected that sleep inertia is believed to be a side effect of taking a nap. In order to maximize the benefits of napping, one should be able to control the period of time they are going to take a nap to avoid being counterproductive.

Sleep and brain functioning

Sleep is necessary for brain functioning as well as other systems in the body. (Medic et al., 2017). Sleep improves the brain's ability to retain information. It also helps for better performance in memory tasks. (Clin & Alba, 2015) Transitions of sleep happen from light to deep to REM.

Light sleep improves the brain's ability to learn new information, while deep sleep on the other hand, enhances your ability to recall inputs and REM sleep helps understand the information taken in. (Borrian & Brown, 2016) According to the study conducted by Bostock, 2017, a nap of thirty to forty minutes, the body will enter in deep sleep. It helps lessen sleep debt, but will take an hour to acquire alertness, so time should be allotted to wake up afterwards.

Moreover, sleep has been found essential in memory consolidation. Sleeping after a period of learning sustains memory. It has also been found of help in avoiding additional encoding to interfere with the newly learned information. (Buckhalt, 2017)

Additionally, sleep disruptions are the problems that affect the continuity of sleep, these include the sleep quality and quantity deficiency. These usually cause malfunctions in the normal operations across different body systems. (Medic et al., 2017)

In association with Patuthi's study on 2016, sleep is an essential factor for the health of both children and adults. In acquiring healthy sleep, factors should be considered such as sufficient duration, appropriate time, quality, consistency, and absence of disturbances and disorders. Sleep duration is a sleep measure associated to health outcomes. Studies showed that adequate sleep length is significantly related to better attention, cognitive functioning, behavior, emotion regulation and physical health.

The brain during sleep

In compliance with the study of Pihl and Aronen on 2015, sleep has been found out to be an essential ingredient for the health of an individual. Having a healthy sleep involves the duration, the regularity of sleep and the absence of disturbance. During the stage of sleep, the body start to replenish all the chemical imbalance.

Also, the body's energy start to fill up and the illnesses start to heal and the body itself protects against the incoming complications. Moreover, the brain is perpetually working. Whether an individual is asleep or not, it scans through everything to what has transpired today. It doesn't have any pause button because it is either ongoing or rewinding.

The amount of sleep

The amount of sleep needed per night of an individual varies depending on the age and needs. Nowadays, most of the people are having insufficient amount of sleep. The quality sleep requires seven to nine of hours of sleep without disturbance. Having incomplete hours of sleep or totally 24-hours awake increases the risk to the health and cognitive function.

A person tend to feel drowsy and unable to accomplish any given task. Being awake for one-day slows the reaction time equal to having a blood alcohol level of 0.10.  Most of the workers tend to feel sleepy and drowsy during afternoon and taking a short sleep is prohibited. The solution of having inadequate hours of sleep is simply taking a nap. Critically taken, it has been shown that taking a nap is more effective than taking a glass coffee containing caffeine. (Nichols, 2018). 

Call Center is a site that composed of representatives who use telecommunication links to conduct sales, service, and technical support to customers where areas are distant, either by the same country or across the globe.

The representative and the customer serves a different purposes by doing everything from assisting them with their customer service complaints to making telemarketing calls, order a sweater from a catalog, make airline reservations, legal advice and advertising. (Baumgartner,2018) also, call center offered different kinds of jobs or assistance to others.

According to Montalba, 2016, call center agents comprises the largest BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) workers. BPO is a contemporary work setting in the Philippines with a large number of young workforces. It is listed as one of the ten most stressful jobs in the present world economy

Alongside with the BPO company, there exists what is called the shiftwork which is common in a 24/7 society. Shiftworkers experience circadian misalignment and disrupted daytime sleep and are more prone to errors and accidents than non-shiftworkers. Countermeasures such as caffeine and naps have been used to mitigate the attentional deficits associated with shiftwork, with inconsistent results (Dorrian,J 2019).

In the present era of globalization, imbalance of sleep causes many factors, mainly during night. Call center agents working in night shifts are prone to having an imbalance sleep. (Patil, et al., 2015) Call center agents are prone to unhealthy lifestyle because of imbalance sleep.

Critically taken, circadian rhythm in the human body is very sensitive to external stimuli when distort. Call center agents may be prone to prolonged interrupted circadian rhythms along with lack of sleep and inhibition of melatonin. Despite of complications regarding sleep among night shift workers like call center agents, this industry continues to grow within the Philippines.