Naps, meditation and perception

"We suffer more often in imagination than in reality."
— Seneca

This month, we have been focusing on sleep.

We have learned just how important it is for our performance and well-being, and how damaging sleep deprivation can be.

However, just knowing how important sleep is won’t help your sleep better—in fact, it can make it worse by causing sleep-related stress. The more we worry about getting enough or “good” sleep, the harder it often becomes.

So today, we’re looking at three scientific articles that, each in their own way, show us that we have a few tools to our deposal that can be used when we face insufficient sleep.

My hope is, that this will help you worry less about sleep, so that you can avoid sleep stress.

Today’s insights is mainly drawn from the following scientific articles: 

“Effects of a Short Daytime Nap on the Cognitive Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”

“Meditation acutely improves psychomotor vigilance, and may decrease sleep need”

“Manipulating sleep duration perception changes cognitive performance - an exploratory analysis”

Today's newsletter

• Takeaways:

• Naps:

• Meditation:

• Perception:

• What can we learn from these studies?

Takeaways:

💤 Napping can boost daytime performance

A short, well-timed nap can significantly improve alertness and cognitive performance for up to two hours.

🧘‍♂️ Meditation is an effective mental recovery and may reduce the need for sleep

Just 40 minutes of breath-focused meditation can enhance reaction time and cognitive performance. Long-term meditators seem to be needing significantly less sleep without performance loss.

🧠 Your mindset about sleep directly affects recovery

How well rested we think we are can influence both how tired we feel, how we perform and even objective measures of brainwaves. This highlights the powerful role of perception and mindset in shaping both subjective and physiological outcomes related to sleep and readiness.

Let me just quickly hear if the problem we are treading in today’s newsletter resonates with you:

Naps:

The first scientific article that I have included in todays newsletter, is a review article on the impact of napping on cognitive performance. 

The authors did a systematic literature review and gathered data from 11 scientific studies with a collected 381 participants, all tested under controlled conditions.

In the studies, participants were either assigned to take a nap or placed in a control group where they stayed awake doing calm activities.

In every study, participants were tested both before and after doing either the nap or control protocol. This made it possible to compare how cognitive performance developed in the nap group versus the control group and to calculate the overall effect of a short daytime nap.

The authors found that those who napped showed better performance afterwards, especially in terms of alertness. 

The improvements were most noticeable within  30 – 120 min after the nap. This is most likely because ”sleep inertia” is affecting the performance within the first 30 min following the nap. 

Sleep inertia is described as the transition from a sleep state to a waking state, which is characterized by a reduction in the ability to think and perform upon awakening because the brain is still somewhat in a sleeping state.  

Therefore, shorter naps could have a benefit, as they should not bring the brain into the slower brainwaves as much as longer naps and sleep.

Interestingly, naps taken earlier in the afternoon, before 1 p.m., worked better than later ones.

So, it seems, that a short well timed nap, can offer a simple method for boosting cognitive performance, and might therefore be an effective tool to manage our recovery over a full 24 hour cycle, with cognitive performance in focus.

Meditation:

In this scientific article, the authors investigated the impact of meditation on cognitive performance in comparison to napping.

Moreover, the authors also wanted to explore whether meditation could help maintain performance in a sleep-deprived state, and whether regular meditation might even reduce the overall need for sleep.

To explore this, they ran two separate studies.

In the first study, they included 10 novice meditators with an average age of 21.5 years.

Each participant did a Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) before, 10 minutes after and 60 minutes after four different conditions:

- control
- nap
- meditation
- sleep deprivation followed by meditation.

The meditation technique was a simple breath-focused practice taught in the days leading up to the test sessions.

Remember you can try the PVT test on the resource site 👉 Resources

In the second study, 7 experienced meditators—each with at least 3 years of daily meditation for over 2 hours—had their sleep tracked over a minimum of 15 days using both sleep journals and objective measures.

Their data were compared to age- and gender-matched non-meditating controls.

In the first study, 40 minutes of meditation clearly improved PVT performance—both under normal conditions and even after a full night without sleep.

In contrast, performance declined after both the nap and control conditions.

This was most likely due to sleep inertia in the nap group and a natural afternoon dip in alertness in the control sessions.

In the second study, the experienced meditators slept significantly less than their matched controls—on average 5.2 hours per night compared to 7.8.

However, they didn’t show any signs of reduced performance. In fact, their PVT results were slightly above average.

This suggests that regular meditation might reduce the need for sleep.

If you wish to start meditating yourself, in order to reap these benefits, remember we have a few meditations on the resource site 👉 Resources

Perception:

The third study I have included in today’s newsletter, is about how the way we perceive our sleep amount, influences our performance.

The authors manipulated a group of peoples perception of their own sleep amount and investigated how this influenced their cognitive performance, perceived readiness and tiredness, as well as objective EEG measures - specifically delta waves and alpha waves during wakefulness.

Delta‑band power is a solid marker of sleep pressure, while high‑alpha power reflects readiness.

This experiment was part of a larger six‑day protocol in which 16 participants lived in an environment free of time cues.

On two of those days, this sleep‑perception test took place.

On the first of these days everyone slept eight hours and on the second of these days everyone slept five hours.

But, to investigate the influence of perceived sleep amount, researchers manipulated how long the participants thought they had slept.

On both days, half were led to believe they slept eight hours, and half five hours, using a specially designed clock that either sped up, ran normally, or slowed down.

The authors found that, on the “8 hours of sleep-night”, participants who believed they slept only five hours showed a significantly slower reaction time on the PVT test, even though their brainwave measures of delta power did not rise. 

After the real “five‑hour night”, those who thought they’d slept eight hours had faster reaction times than those told they’d slept five, and the increase in delta-power was noticeably blunted.

In both scenarios, high‑alpha power followed the participants perception - It was lower when people believed they slept only 5 hours and higher when they believed they were well‑rested.

If you want to test your own performance on the PVT test, your can go to our resource site 👉 Resources

What can we learn from these studies?

These three studies all show us that we have tools at our disposal for when life throws us into situations with insufficient sleep.

The first two studies highlight that sleep and recovery shouldn’t just be seen as something that happens only during the 8 hours at night.

Recovery is a 24-hour process, and with the right knowledge, we can use simple techniques to create short windows of recovery during the day.

With the third study, the point is not saying you should go out and buy a special watch that runs faster.

But it does demonstrate how our perception and mindset can influence not only how we feel and perform, but also deeper physiological markers related to tiredness and readiness.

So, while always aiming for a good 7-8 hours of sleep, I believe we should also cultivate a healthy mindset around sleep and recovery - always believe and tell yourself that you had sufficient sleep and are well rested.

Our mindset has such a huge impact, so we need to learn to use it to our advantages.

My hope is that by reading the newsletters Im writing, you can learn more about sleep, the brain, and recovery, and that this will make you confident that you can manage your sleep and recovery effectively. Because I believe that this will change your mindset towards your recovery, which will spill over, and make you actually feel and be more recovered.

That said, it’s important to note that both the meditation and sleep perception studies had small sample sizes. And, to my knowledge, the sleep perception experiment has not yet been replicated. So, we should view the results with some healthy skepticism.

However, the idea that meditation can enhance immediate cognitive performance is something we’ve seen in previous studies that I have reviewed in these newsletters.

And likewise, the phenomenon that belief in an outcome can influence the effect of a protocol is a well-documented one — often referred to as the placebo effect or expectation effect – and something we have also seen in previous newsletters.

_{Disclaimer: The above is mainly based on the articles “Effects of a Short Daytime Nap on the Cognitive Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” by Frédéric Dutheil et al. & “Meditation acutely improves psychomotor vigilance, and may decrease sleep need” by Prashant Kaul et. al & “Manipulating sleep duration perception changes cognitive performance - an exploratory analysis” By Shadab A. Rahman et. al and aims to provide key takeaways and a condensed overview of its content. While the essence is drawn from the original article, some parts have been simplified or rephrased to enhance understanding. Please note that we at, OptiMindInsights or any other potential writers or contributors to our summaries, do not accept responsibility for any consequences arising from the use of this summary. The information provided should not be considered a substitute for personal research or professional advice. Readers are encouraged to consult the original article for detailed insights and references. The summary does not include references, but they can typically be found within the original publication. Always exercise due diligence and consider your unique circumstances before applying any information in your personal or professional life. We refer to the creative commons for reproducibility rights.}