Nap Time
(mentioned on the July 7, 2008 The Indigo Room: Creating Our Reality Show)
By Dennis Drabelle Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 29, 2008; Page HE01
Though the Practice Is Fading in Some Places,
Experts Find Benefits In Midday Slumber. And a Few Firms Are Even Open to
Shut-Eye.
I never used to be a napper. In fact, daytime slumber was virtually beyond a
congenitally wired type like me. My buddies would catch 40 winks on the long bus
ride home from our high school, but for me that was out of the question. With
age, however, my metabolism has changed. After the double whammy of a
late-morning run and lunch, I'm pretty much a goner. I lie down and nod off in
much the same way that Marlene Dietrich fell in love in that old song of hers:
because I can't help it.
While it lasted, though, my nap resistance put me in sync with the American
way of sleep: Do it all at once and strictly at night. Traditionally, we've
begrudged ourselves naps. They may be forced on toddlers, recommended for
pregnant women and tolerated among senior citizens with nothing better to do,
but they've been frowned upon for worker bees in their prime. Recently, however,
sleep scientists have discovered advantages to napping, which they view not just
as solace but also as something akin to brain food. No longer written off as a
cop-out for the weak and the bored, the nap is coming into its own as an element
of a healthy life.
When you take a look at American history, we might seem to be a nap-friendly
people. After all, some of our most productive figures napped shamelessly during
the day, among them Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. But they probably did so because, like Dietrich,
they couldn't help it. Consider the daily schedule Franklin drew up for "The Art
of Virtue," a treatise he worked on for 50 years but never finished: Over a
24-hour period, sleep gets allotted a mere five hours. Or take the contemptuous
words of Edison: "Sleep is an acquired habit. Cells don't sleep. Fish swim in
the water all night. Even a horse doesn't sleep. A man doesn't need any sleep."
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Sleep Your Way Slim (mentioned on the July 7, 2008 The Indigo Room: Creating Our Reality Show)By Lucy Danziger, SELF Editor-in-ChiefA study in the
Annals of Internal Medicine found that clocking
too few zzz's may increase your appetite, which is what used to happen
to me. I would replace the calories burned during a spinning class or
run (and then some) because I felt depleted. People who log a solid
eight hours, on the other hand, tend to weigh less.
Ample shut-eye
encourages your body to produce more of the fullness hormone leptin and
less of the hunger hormone ghrelin, plus it helps ease anxiety and
depression, both of which can trigger emotional eating.
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