Like many other young people I know, my sleep schedule is very poor. There are often nights I don’t fall asleep until 2am and in the morning I don’t wake up until 10am. I have tried about every possible thing to change this pattern and yet I still don’t get enough sleep. So for the past week, I took up napping. This isn’t actually a new thing for me, as I have been known to fall asleep in the afternoon anyway. However, I planned my naps this time. What I learned is that napping is not just as easy as falling asleep in the middle of the day and it is an activity not for the faint of heart.
I decided that every day as soon as my classes were over I was going to take a 30-minute nap. I have been told a nap of ideal length is long enough for you to feel rested but not long enough to fall into a deep sleep and feel startled when you wake up. I am not good at this. I have always been a fan of the unexpected three-hour nap on the couch before dinner where my parents had to inevitably wake me up for spaghetti. I was always grumpy the rest of the day. For the majority of my childhood, and even now, my mom has tried to prevent me from napping at all costs. I will wake up feeling less rested than before, even grumpier than I was before, and not excited to be around people. All this is to say, I landed on the idea of a 30-minute nap every day around 2 o’clock.
Preparing for these naps took a lot more than I thought it would. This is not a time of day when people usually become unreachable. I am an obsessive phone checker. I check every notification almost instantly so to avoid distraction while trying to nap I would have to turn my phone entirely off. But this led to problems of sleeping for longer than I would like with no alarm to wake me up. Long story short, I discovered the Do Not Disturb feature on my phone for the first time. Even still, I struggled to get comfortable in the middle of the day to intentionally take a nap.
At the end of the week, I don’t think I accomplished one successful nap. I slept too long some days and not at all on others. I am struggling to recognize if naps are something of an art form that I need to master, or if they just aren’t for me. They feel so good when they happen by accident, but I always feel pretty bad afterward.
So for now, I am done scheduling my naps. Taking the pressure of when and how long I take them might help. I plan to continue resting in the afternoon before picking up my evening responsibilities but perhaps not always in the form of a nap. Naps are not for the faint of heart and I am thoroughly jealous of those who can lay down and fall asleep for 20 minutes and then wake up and feel rested.
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