Many people try not to take power naps during the day, afraid that it will affect a good night’s sleep, but it may be good for us. All around the world in many cultures, a nap is a customary routine. The Spanish are known to enjoy a daily siesta and in Japan, workers at lunch indulge in a sleep known as hirune, or “afternoon nap.”

Big tech companies such as Google, Samsung, and Facebook have nap pods in their facilities letting employees take naps during the workday. Power napping is a rising trend, but does it work? Does it make you feel more refreshed and energized or do you just feel more tired than you were? The latest science explores whether napping is good for our health. 

Some health benefits of napping are that they are good for the long-term health of our brains, research shows us this. Daily naps can help keep our brains bigger for longer amounts of time and can boost the brain’s health according to a study in 2023 by researchers at the University College London or UCL. The researchers looked at data from around 35,000 people ranging from ages 40 to 69. They had taken part in a study by the UK Biobank which is a biochemical database and research resource. 

They looked at people who don’t take daytime naps compared to the people who do take daily naps. The brains of people who took several naps a week were more than 15 cubic centimeters larger than people who weren’t nappers. This means the brains of people who nap daily delay the aging of their brain between three to six years, says the lead author Victoria Garfield, a researcher at MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at UCL.   

The biggest discovery was that daytime napping is strongly linked to having a larger brain volume. The brain naturally shrinks with age and a smaller brain volume can be linked to a very wide range of diseases. “Anything you can do to preserve your brain size for as long as possible is a good thing,” says Garfield “And a nap can help with this.” 

Napping is critical for the development of babies, showing that they don’t remember things if they don’t have a long nap after. However, the benefits of napping for adults are a lot less understood. The long-term benefits of people who nap regularly have to be cumulative or increasing in napping. 

There are some benefits of short-term napping as well. A quick 10 to 15-minute nap can improve how well we perform mentally and physically throughout the day. So should napping be part of our daily routine? Most experts say that napping still isn’t a substitute for a good night’s sleep. “Napping is usually a sign of not getting a sufficient amount of sleep,” says Colin Espie, a professor of sleep medicine at the University of Oxford. “If you are thinking of taking a nap it’s important to ask yourself whether you are compensating for not getting enough sleep.” 

In conclusion, napping has many benefits but at the same time is it just a way to make up for the sleep you missed during the night? This is still a debatable topic to many researchers and scientists.