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Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

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Re: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

#151

Post by duffx »

Keep in mind that after 2-3 weeks of habitual coffee drinking, your body acclimates to the effects of caffeine and you no longer receive a performance benefit. At that point all drinking coffee does for you is ward off the effects of withdrawal and return you to baseline performance levels - until the effects wear off and withdrawal kicks in again, at which point your performance is below average.

Caffeine is best used strategically, which means not every day. Save it for days where you're feeling particularly low energy, or need a boost to tackle a problem you're not particularly excited about doing.

That said, the half-life of caffeine is around 6 hours, which means if you have a coffee at 3pm, at 3am you still have a quarter-cup's worth of caffeine in your system, preventing you from entering deep sleep. So even then I'd keep caffeine as a first-thing-in-the-morning type of deal.

Naps I'm a big fan of. I take one every day after lunch. The trick is to simply lay down and close your eyes for 20 minutes. Don't worry if you fall asleep or not - just give your eyes a rest. For the first few days/weeks, you might not fall asleep. But eventually your body grows accustomed to the ritual and it becomes easier to actually fall asleep at hat time.

Re: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

#152

Post by keithpeter »

chii wrote: post #126
aeire wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm.. i believe this is pretty the same in Greece, at least during weekends, holidays and work-free days. In every lunch-gathering with close relatives, or close friends, at least one or two person take a short nap on the couch after the lunch, while the rest are having a relaxed and low voice chat. Usually the persons who fall asleep are males.

wow, how does anyone get anything done in that country! Compare it to the asian countries that work 16 hour days....

People work later in the (cooler) evening.

Given the right architecture (high ceiling, verandah, stone walls) a shift in work day like this can offset high temperatures without using huge amounts of electricity for air conditioning.

PS: Judging by the Chinese overseas students I meet I think 16 hour work days may become a memory in a generation or two.

Re: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

#153

Post by coldtea »

chii wrote: post #126
aeire wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm.. i believe this is pretty the same in Greece, at least during weekends, holidays and work-free days. In every lunch-gathering with close relatives, or close friends, at least one or two person take a short nap on the couch after the lunch, while the rest are having a relaxed and low voice chat. Usually the persons who fall asleep are males.

wow, how does anyone get anything done in that country! Compare it to the asian countries that work 16 hour days....

>how does anyone get anything done in that country!

By not confusing actually doing work with being kept busy for 16 hours to please the "company" / "boss".

Plus, it's not like this happens everytime and for everyone. People in Greece work longer hours than most of Europeans.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/05/16...

Re: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

#154

Post by sergiosgc »

masklinn wrote: post #94
Swizec wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you lay still with your eyes closed and make sure your phone and internet stay quiet, you will fall asleep in 10 minutes or so. That then leaves enough to get 10 minutes or so of sleep and get back up 20 minutes after starting your nap. Much longer than that and you risk not getting up for another few hours. Much less than that and you won't get any rest. And yes, this works perfectly well even without fallin…

> Yes. If you lay still with your eyes closed and make sure your phone and internet stay quiet, you will fall asleep in 10 minutes or so. Nope, well over an hour is my average. And that's at night in my bed after a full day work.

I've been there. Although every case is different, you may be successful with my approach. I observed that it is much more difficult for me to sleep when very tired, and that I'm awful at auto measuring the time to go to bed. So, I adopted a rigid 7h sleep schedule for a month. I added some exercise (swimming), to guarantee success. Worked like a charm. Nowadays I'm more flexible about the schedule, but vigilant as to whether I'm slipping.

I think the most important thing I did was defining that taking one hour to fall asleep was problematic and then tackling the problem methodically. Seeing a doctor about it was on my scope had I failed to solve the problem on my own.

Re: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

#155

Post by TeMPOraL »

swombat wrote: post #131
ConnorG wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an avid napper back at college and thoroughly employed the coffee nap technique. Now I'm in the workforce, but my body is still yearning for naps at work. I find myself drifting off here and there, but never fully commit. I'm afraid to take a full nap at work due to how it may look. Do you find yourself being judged for taking naps at work?

You can take surprisingly good naps sitting in a toilet cubicle - I did so for many months at Accenture and never had a problem. It energised me and enabled me to do better work the rest of the time.

I thought I was the only one weird enough person in the world to actually nap in a toilet. I can say a lot of good things about my company work culture, but unfortunately, naps in the middle of the work day are frowned upon there.

Re: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

#156

Post by TeMPOraL »

ihaveajob wrote: post #140
bigtunacan wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. A bed should serve for only two purposes; sleeping and we all know the other. Watching TV, laptops, reading, etc... do not train your brain that the bed is for sleeping. Now I lay in bed for a nap and I will typically zonk out in a couple of minutes.

I find that reading fiction in bed is a great way to fall asleep. Nothing technical or business related, though, that's a guarantee of a short and poor sleep.

For me reading fiction in bed is a great way to fall asleep... the next day at work. I lost countless hours of sleep at night and productivity during the day thanks to people like HN's own cstross, who absolutely, positively have to create captivating, entertaining and addicting pieces of writing...

Re: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

#157

Post by ams6110 »

chii wrote: post #126
aeire wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm.. i believe this is pretty the same in Greece, at least during weekends, holidays and work-free days. In every lunch-gathering with close relatives, or close friends, at least one or two person take a short nap on the couch after the lunch, while the rest are having a relaxed and low voice chat. Usually the persons who fall asleep are males.

wow, how does anyone get anything done in that country! Compare it to the asian countries that work 16 hour days....

They don't. Spain and Greece are both bankrupt or nearly so.

Re: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

#158

Post by lilsunnybee »

goblin89 wrote: post #100
lilsunnybee wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like a love hotel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_hotel ), but sans coupling. Or like a capsule hotel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel ), but with attached shower. Even on non-prime real-estate (which does that exist in SF?), I don't think you could hit your $20 price point with the amount of housekeeping needed for a bed and shower. Even if you could, after a week your staff might hate you. :-)

> So like a love hotel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_hotel ), but sans coupling. Or like a capsule hotel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel ), but with attached shower. To be fair, they say Japanese love hotels allow single guests ( https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Japan#Love_hotels ) and capsule hotels have showers ( https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Japan#Capsule_hotels ). I don't doubt, though, that eve…

Capsule hotels don't usually have attached showers though do they? It's more of a communal thing, which maybe that would work just fine for what mmanfrin was thinking of. Though historically Americans aren't as accustomed to communal bathing (well except for gyms) as the Japanese.

Re: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone

#160

Post by bemmu »

baby wrote: post #110
themodelplumber wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it takes practice. I can't let my mind wander though. If I want to take a nap in the middle of the day I have to consciously visualize something. The visualization that has worked best for me over the last year has been sitting in my childhood home, assembling the tail section of a scale model Su-24. The end product looks a lot like this one: http://paperwings.orgfree.com/su24/index.htm (except I never finis…

> I can't let my mind wander though I force myself to. I just simulate what happens when I really start falling asleep. I create random thoughts and I chain them as fast as possible. Example: If I break the ice with my hammer the calendar will fall on monday, but I have to escape from a huge mountain today, etc... Works super well for me. If I really need to sleep I'll use that technique, if I'm not sleepy I can do t…

When I finally manage to fall asleep, I can't remember the next day how I did it.

I've noticed it is often preceded by having some thought, then 5 seconds later realizing that the thought I just had makes absolutely no sense. I guess that's the reality testing switching off.

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