How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)
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How To Be An Expert Nap-Artist
There’s a lot of science to say that napping can bring us health benefits—but mistiming it can just make us more tired. So, how to get some refreshing shut-eye, without ending up with a case of the midday melatonin blues?
First, why do we want to nap?
Well, maybe we’re just tired, but there are specific benefits even if we’re not. For example:
- Increased alertness
- Helps with learning
- Improved memory
- Boost to immunity
- Enhance athletic performance
What can go wrong?
There are two main things that can go wrong, physiologically speaking:
- We can overdo it, and not sleep well at night
- We can awake groggy and confused and tired
The first is self-explanatory—it messes with the circadian rhythm. For this reason, we should not sleep more than 90 minutes during the day. If that seems like a lot, and maybe you’ve heard that we shouldn’t sleep more than half an hour, there is science here, so read on…
The second is a matter of sleep cycles. Our brain naturally organizes our sleep into multiples of 20-minute segments, with a slight break of a few minutes between each. Consequently, naps should be:
- 25ish minutes
- 40–45 minutes
- 90ish minutes
If you wake up mid-cycle—for example, because your alarm went off, or someone disturbed you, or even because you needed to pee, you will be groggy, disoriented, and exhausted.
For this reason, a nap of one hour (a common choice, since people like “round” numbers) is a recipe for disaster, and will only work if you take 15 minutes to fall asleep. In which case, it’d really be a nap of 45 minutes, made up of two 20-minute sleep cycles.
Some interruptions are better/worse than others
If you’re in light or REM sleep, a disruption will leave you not very refreshed, but not wiped out either. And as a bonus, if you’re interrupted during a REM cycle, you’re more likely to remember your dreams.
If you’re in deep sleep, a disruption will leave you with what feels like an incredible hangover, minus the headache, and you’ll be far more tired than you were before you started the nap.
The best way to nap
Taking these factors into account, one of the “safest” ways to nap is to set your alarm for the top end of the time-bracket above the one you actually want to nap for (e.g., if you want to nap for 25ish minutes, set your alarm for 45).
Unless you’re very sleep-deprived, you’ll probably wake up briefly after 20–25 minutes of sleep. This may seem like nearer 30 minutes, if it took you some minutes to fall asleep!
If you don’t wake up then, or otherwise fail to get up, your alarm will catch you later at what will hopefully be between your next sleep cycles, or at the very least not right in the middle of one.
When you wake up from a nap before your alarm, get up. This is not the time for “5 more minutes” because “5 more minutes” will never, ever, be refreshing.
Rest well!
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Stress Resets – by Dr. Jennifer Taitz
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You may be thinking: “that’s a bold claim in the subtitle; does the book deliver?”
And yes, yes it does.
The “resets” themselves are divided into categories:
- Mind resets, which are mostly CBT,
- Body resets, which include assorted somatic therapies such as vagus nerve resets, the judicious use of ice-water, what 1-minute sprints of exercise can do for your mental state, and why not to use the wrong somatic therapy for the wrong situation!
- Behavior resets, which are more about the big picture, and not falling into common traps.
What common traps, you ask? This is about how we often have maladaptive responses to stress, e.g. we’re short of money so we overspend, we have an important deadline so we over-research and procrastinate, we’re anxious so we hyperfixate on the problem, we’re grieving so we look to substances to try to cope, we’re exhausted so we stay up late to try to claw back some lost time. Things where our attempt to cope actually makes things worse for us.
Instead, Dr. Taitz advises us of how to get ourselves from “knowing we shouldn’t do that” to actually not doing that, and how to respond more healthily to stress, how to turn general stress into eustress, or as she puts it, how to “turn your knots into bows”.
The style is… “Academic light”, perhaps we could say. It’s a step above pop-science, but a step below pure academic literature, which does make it a very pleasant read as well as informative. There are often footnotes at the bottom of each page to bridge any knowledge-gap, and for those who want to know the evidence of these evidence-based approaches, she does provide 35 pages of hard science sources to back up her claims.
Bottom line: if you’d like to learn how better to manage stress from an evidence-based perspective that’s not just “do minfdulness meditation”, then this book gives a lot of ways.
Click here to check out Stress Resets, and indeed soothe your body and mind in minutes!
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Fast Like A Girl – by Dr. Mindy Pelz
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A lot of information out there when it comes to intermittent fasting is very much centered on men in the 25–35 years age range. What about the rest of us?
Our physiological needs are not the same, and it’d be foolhardy to ignore that. But what things do still stand the same, and what things would benefit from a different approach in our cases?
Dr. Pelz has our back with this book packed with information based on the best science currently out there. She gives a general overview of fasting with full consideration to the fact that we the reader may well be female or over a certain age or both. In addition, the book offers:
- Metabolic switching (the “missing key to weight loss”)
- Building a fasting lifestyle (that works with your actual life, not just on paper)
- How to time fasting according to your menstrual cycle (if you don’t have a cycle, she has you covered too)
- How to break a fast—properly (and many other hacks/tips/tricks to make fasting so much easier)
Bottom line: if you want to do intermittent fasting and want to work with rather than against your body, then this book is a fine option.
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Fascia Hopping: The Powerful Over-50 Exercise You’re Probably Not Doing
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A 62-year-old man reported feeling 10 years younger after just 8 days of fascia hopping. Now, anecdote ≠ data, but it seems worth investigating:
Let’s hop straight to it
Fascia is the web-like layer of connective tissue that divides your muscles and organs from each other. It simultaneously holds some stuff in place, and allows other parts to glide over each other with minimal friction.
At least, that’s what it’s supposed to do.
Like any body part, it can go wrong. And like any body part, it needs maintenance. In fascia’s case, the maintenance is to keep it slippy where it should be slippy and grippy where it should be grippy.
Here’s an exercise series for that, as described/shown in the video:
Prepping the fascia:
- Align posture: head lifted, shoulders down.
- Stretch fascia in all directions (up-down, left-right).
- Maintain a “fascia wetsuit” concept—taut but not unduly tense.
Springboard feet setup:
- Stand on balls of feet, heels slightly raised.
- Bounce gently to engage fascia elasticity.
“Fascia Strength & Power” dance:
- Move hips in a figure-eight motion.
- Keep shoulders relaxed, allowing movement to flow from the center.
Fascia hopping:
- Keep heels fixed, bounce lightly.
- Progress to small hops if possible.
- Maintain a smooth rhythm to activate elasticity.
Do these for 2 minutes daily for 7 days. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated exercise session; you can do it while you’re waiting for the water to boil in the kitchen, or things like that.
For more on these exercises plus visual demonstrations (it’s very simple), enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Fascia: Why (And How) You Should Take Care Of Yours
Take care!
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Beetroot vs Cucumber – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing beetroot to cucumber, we picked the beetroot.
Why?
While they’re both mostly-water vegetables that can go in salads, soups, and sauces, they have some notable differences:
In terms of macros, beetroot has nearly 3x the carbs and/but also nearly 6x the fiber, so we say beetroot wins this category.
On the vitamins front, beetroot has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, B7, B9, C, and E, while cucumber has more of vitamins A, B5, and K. In short, a clear win for beetroot.
In the category of minerals, beetroot has more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while cucumber is not richer in any minerals.
When it comes to beneficial phytochemicals, both have good things to offer, though we say beetroot has more. Notably, cucumber extract beats glucosamine and chondroitin for reducing joint inflammation, at 1/135th of the dose. On the other hand, beetroot’s phytochemical benefits are so numerous we’ll not list them here, and just recommend checking out the link below!
In short, a win in all categories for beetroot, but cucumbers are great too, so by all means enjoy either or both!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Beetroot For More Than Just Your Blood Pressure
Enjoy!
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Increase in online ADHD diagnoses for kids poses ethical questions
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In 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, clinical protocols were altered for Ontario health clinics, allowing them to perform more types of care virtually. This included ADHD assessments and ADHD prescriptions for children – services that previously had been restricted to in-person appointments. But while other restrictions on virtual care are back, clinics are still allowed to virtually assess children for ADHD.
This shift has allowed for more and quicker diagnoses – though not covered by provincial insurance (OHIP) – via a host of newly emerging private, for-profit clinics. However, it also has raised significant ethical questions.
It solves an equity issue in terms of rural access to timely assessments, but does it also create new equity issues as a privatized service?
Is it even feasible to diagnose a child for a condition like ADHD without meeting that child in person?
And as rates of ADHD diagnosis continue to rise, should health regulators re-examine the virtual care approach?
Ontario: More prescriptions, less regulation
There are numerous for-profit clinics offering virtual diagnoses and prescriptions for childhood ADHD in Ontario. These include KixCare, which does not offer the option of an in-person assessment. Another clinic, Springboard, makes virtual appointments available within days, charging around $2,600 for assessments, which take three to four hours. The clinic offers coaching and therapy at an additional cost, also not covered by OHIP. Families can choose to continue to visit the clinic virtually during a trial stage with medications, prescribed by a doctor in the clinic who then sends prescribing information back to the child’s primary care provider.
For-profit clinics like these are departing from Canada’s traditional single-payer health care model. By charging patients out-of-pocket fees for services, the clinics are able to generate more revenue because they are working outside of the billing standards for OHIP, standards that set limits on the maximum amount doctors can earn for providing specific services. Instead many services are provided by non-physician providers, who are not limited by OHIP in the same way.
Need for safeguards
ADHD prescriptions rose during the pandemic in Ontario, with women, people of higher income and those aged 20 to 24 receiving the most new diagnoses, according to research published in January 2024 by a team including researchers from the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health and Holland Bloorview Children’s Hospital. There may be numerous reasons for this increase but could the move to virtual care have been a factor?
Ontario psychiatrist Javeed Sukhera, who treats both children and adults in Canada and the U.S., says virtual assessments can work for youth with ADHD, who may receive treatment quicker if they live in remote areas. However, he is concerned that as health care becomes more privatized, it will lead to exploitation and over-diagnosis of certain conditions.
“There have been a lot of profiteers who have tried to capitalize on people’s needs and I think this is very dangerous,” he said. “In some settings, profiteering companies have set up systems to offer ADHD assessments that are almost always substandard. This is different from not-for-profit setups that adhere to quality standards and regulatory mechanisms.”
Sukhera’s concerns recall the case of Cerebral Inc., a New York state-based virtual care company founded in 2020 that marketed on social media platforms including Instagram and TikTok. Cerebral offered online prescriptions for ADHD drugs among other services and boasted more than 200,000 patients. But as Dani Blum reported in the New York Times, Cerebral was accused in 2023 of pressuring doctors on staff to prescribe stimulants and faced an investigation by state prosecutors into whether it violated the U.S. Controlled Substances Act.
“At the start of the pandemic, regulators relaxed rules around medical prescription of controlled substances,” wrote Blum. “Those changes opened the door for companies to prescribe and market drugs without the protocols that can accompany an in-person visit.”
Access increased – but is it equitable?
Virtual care has been a necessity in rural areas in Ontario since well before the pandemic, although ADHD assessments for children were restricted to in-person appointments prior to 2020.
But ADHD assessment clinics that charge families out-of-pocket for services are only accessible to people with higher incomes. Rural families, many of whom are low income, are unable to afford thousands for private assessments, let alone the other services upsold by providers. If the private clinic/virtual care trend continues to grow unchecked, it may also attract doctors away from the public model of care since they can bill more for services. This could further aggravate the gap in care that lower income people already experience.
This could further aggravate the gap in care that lower income people already experience.
Sukhera says some risks could be addressed by instituting OHIP coverage for services at private clinics (similar to private surgical facilities that offer mixed private/public coverage), but also with safeguards to ensure that profits are reinvested back into the health-care system.
“This would be especially useful for folks who do not have the income, the means to pay out of pocket,” he said.
Concerns of misdiagnosis and over-prescription
Some for-profit companies also benefit financially from diagnosing and issuing prescriptions, as has been suggested in the Cerebral case. If it is cheaper for a clinic to do shorter, virtual appointments and they are also motivated to diagnose and prescribe more, then controls need to be put in place to prevent misdiagnosis.
The problem of misdiagnosis may also be related to the nature of ADHD assessments themselves. University of Strathclyde professor Matthew Smith, author of Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD, notes that since the publication of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, assessment has typically involved a few hours of parents and patients providing their subjective perspectives on how they experience time, tasks and the world around them.
“It’s often a box-ticking exercise, rather than really learning about the context in which these behaviours exist,” Smith said. “The tendency has been to use a list of yes/no questions which – if enough are answered in the affirmative – lead to a diagnosis. When this is done online or via Zoom, there is even less opportunity to understand the context surrounding behaviour.”
Smith cited a 2023 BBC investigation in which reporter Rory Carson booked an in-person ADHD assessment at a clinic and was found not to have the condition, then had a private online assessment – from a provider on her couch in a tracksuit – and was diagnosed with ADHD after just 45 minutes, for a fee of £685.
What do patients want?
If Canadian regulators can effectively tackle the issue of privatization and the risk of misdiagnosis, there is still another hurdle: not every youth is willing to take part in virtual care.
Jennifer Reesman, a therapist and Training Director for Neuropsychology at the Chesapeake Center for ADHD, Learning & Behavioural Health in Maryland, echoed Sukhera’s concerns about substandard care, cautioning that virtual care is not suitable for some of her young clients who had poor experiences with online education and resist online health care. It can be an emotional issue for pediatric patients who are managing their feelings about the pandemic experience.
“We need to respect what their needs are, not just the needs of the provider,” says Reesman.
In 2020, Ontario opted for virtual care based on the capacity of our health system in a pandemic. Today, with a shortage of doctors, we are still in a crisis of capacity. The success of virtual care may rest on how engaged regulators are with equity issues, such as waitlists and access to care for rural dwellers, and how they resolve ethical problems around standards of care.
Children and youth are a distinct category, which is why we had restrictions on virtual ADHD diagnosis prior to the pandemic. A question remains, then: If we could snap our fingers and have the capacity to provide in-person ADHD care for all children, would we? If the answer to that question is yes, then how can we begin to build our capacity?
This article is republished from healthydebate under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Fixing Fascia
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Fascia: Why (And How) You Should Take Care Of Yours
Fascia is the web-like layer of connective tissue that divides your muscles and organs from each other. It simultaneously holds some stuff in place, and allows other parts to glide over each other with minimal friction.
At least, that’s what it’s supposed to do.
Like any body part, it can go wrong. More on this later. But first…
A quick note on terms
It may seem like sometimes people say “myofascial” because it sounds fancier, but it does actually have a specific meaning too:
- “Fascia” is what we just described above
- “Myofascial” means “of or relating to muscles and fascia”
For example, “myofascial release” means “stopping the fascia from sticking to the muscle where it shouldn’t” and “myofascial pain” means “pain that has to do with the muscles and fascia”. See also:
Myofascial vs Fascia: When To Use Each One? What To Consider
Why fascia is so ignored
For millennia, it was mostly disregarded as a “neither this nor that” tissue that just happens to be in the body. We didn’t pay attention to it, just like we mostly don’t pay attention to the air around us.
But, much like the air around us, we sure pay attention when something goes wrong with it!
However, even in more recent years, we’ve been held back until quite new developments like musculoskeletal ultrasound that could show us problems with the fascia.
What can go wrong
It’s supposed to be strong, thin, supple, and slippery. It holds on in the necessary places like a spiderweb, but for the most part, it is evolved for minimum friction.
Some things can cause it to thicken and become sticky in the wrong places. Things such as:
- Physical trauma, e.g. an injury or surgery—but we repeat ourselves, because a surgery is an injury! It’s a (usually) necessary injury, but an injury nonetheless.
- Compensation for pain. If a body part hurts for some reason, and your posture changes to accommodate that, doing so can mess up your fascia, and cause you different problems somewhere else entirely.
- This is not witchcraft; think of how, when using a corded vacuum cleaner, sometimes the cord can get snagged on something in the next room and we nearly break something because we expected it to just come with us and it didn’t? It’s like that.
- Repetitive movements (repetitive strain injury is partly a myofascial issue)
- Not enough movement: when it comes to range of motion, it’s “use it or lose it”.
- The human body tries its best to be as efficient as possible for us! So eventually it will go “Hey, I notice you never move more than 30º in this direction, so I’m going to stop making fascia that allows you to go past that point, and I’ll just dump the materials here instead”
“I’ll just dump the materials here instead” is also part of the problem—it creates what we colloquially call “knots”, which are not so much part of the muscle as the fascia that covers it. That’s an actual physical sticky lumpy bit.
What to do about it
Firstly, avoid the above things! But, if for whatever reason something has gone wrong and you now have sticky lumpy fascia that doesn’t let you move the way you’d like (if you have any mobility/flexibility issues that aren’t for another known reason, then this is usually it), there are things can be done:
- Heat—is definitely not a cure-all, but it’s a good first step before doing the other things. A heating pad or a warm bath are great.
- Here’s an example of a neck+back+shoulders heating pad; you can get them for different body parts, or just use an electric blanket!
- Massage—ideally, by someone else who knows what they are doing. Self-massage is possible, as is teaching oneself (there are plenty of video tutorials available), but skilled professional therapeutic myofascial release massage is the gold standard.
- Foam rollers are a great no-skill way to get going with self-massage, whether because that’s what’s available to you, or because you just want something you can do between sessions. Here’s an example of the kind we mean.
- Acupuncture—triggering localized muscular relaxation, an important part of myofascial release, is something acupuncture is good at.
- See also: Pinpointing The Usefulness Of Acupuncture ← noteworthily, the strongest criticism of acupuncture for pain relief is that it performs only slightly better than sham acupuncture, but taken in practical terms, all that really means is “sticking little needles in does work, even if not necessarily by the mechanism acupuncturists believe”
- Calisthenics—Pilates, yoga, and other forms of body movement training can help gradually get one’s fascia to where and how it’s supposed to be.
- This is that “use it or lose it” bodily efficiency we talked about!
Remember, the body is always rebuilding itself. It never stops, until you die. So on any given day, you get to choose whether it rebuilds itself a little bit worse or a little bit better.
Take care!
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