I often take a half hour or one hour nap during the day, especially when I woke up somewhere between 3 AM and 4 AM during the night before.

But an article in the Guardian indicates that it is better to have a full night´s sleep. It is an article on sleep deprivation. It is about a major researcher in the field, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His name is Matthew Walker.

Walker has spent the last four and a half years writing Why We Sleep, a complex but urgent book that examines the effects of this epidemic close up, the idea being that once people know of the powerful links between sleep loss and, among other things, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and poor mental health, they will try harder to get the recommended eight hours a night (sleep deprivation, amazing as this may sound to Donald Trump types, constitutes anything less than seven hours).

Choose your disease: Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, obesity, …

A Specific Example

The author of this newspaper article takes Walker extremely seriously. Here is his personal testimony.

Will Why We Sleep have the impact its author hopes? I’m not sure: the science bits, it must be said, require some concentration. But what I can tell you is that it had a powerful effect on me. After reading it, I was absolutely determined to go to bed earlier — a regime to which I am sticking determinedly. . . .Once you know that after just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep, your natural killer cells – the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day – drop by 70%, or that a lack of sleep is linked to cancer of the bowel, prostate and breast, or even just that the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen, how could you do anything else?” . . .

The evidence Walker presents, however, is enough to send anyone early to bed. It’s no kind of choice at all. Without sleep, there is low energy and disease. With sleep, there is vitality and health. More than 20 large scale epidemiological studies all report the same clear relationship: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. To take just one example, adults aged 45 years or older who sleep less than six hours a night are 200% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven or eight hours a night (part of the reason for this has to do with blood pressure: even just one night of modest sleep reduction will speed the rate of a person’s heart, hour upon hour, and significantly increase their blood pressure).

In short words: sleep more.

How To Fall Asleep

I have described in an earlier article about how to fall asleep anywhere, in only two (2) minutes time or less, here https://ip-lawyer-tools.com/the-one-army-technique-that-helps-me-most-in-my-daily-life-how-to-fall-asleep-anywhere-in-only-two-2-minutes-time-or-less/