Siesta Science: Is It Better To Nap On Hot Days?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
No question/request too big or small 😎
❝You said not to exericse too much in the middle of the day when it’s hot, good advice but is it good to sleep in the day ie a nap during the hottest part? Or would that just make it even harder to sleep at night?❞
If you’re experiencing extreme heat where you are, then (assuming you are otherwise healthy) that heat is likely the main threat to your health at this time, which means many other health-related considerations can take a back seat where necessary.
That doesn’t mean just abandon other healthy practices if you can reasonably (safely!) keep them up, but it does mean that if your choice is between ruining your average step count and getting heatstroke, please ruin your average step count. You can always get better numbers later, but to do that, you have to not die of heatstroke first.
See also: Stay Safe From Heat Exhaustion & Heatstroke!
As well as more specific-to-some-people factors, such as: The Common Meds That Make You Much More Susceptible To Heatstroke and Beat The Heat, With Fat
You asked about sleep though, so let’s get on to that more specifically…
Daytime sleepiness is itself a health risk
…especially when coupled with difficulty sleeping at night.
Which is a problem, because extreme heat tends to promote both things (daytime sleepiness and difficulty sleeping at night)
For example, researchers (Dr. Slobodanka Pejovic et al.) found that adults who experience both excessive daytime sleepiness and difficulty falling asleep have a substantially higher risk of developing high blood pressure than those with either problem alone.
Note: “excessive daytime sleepiness” was defined as an inability to stay awake and alert during normal daytime activities, including moderate-to-severe daytime sleepiness or irresistible sleep attacks (i.e. surprise naps).
In numbers:
Excessive daytime sleepiness alone was associated with:
- 52% higher risk of already having hypertension.
- 74% higher risk of developing hypertension during follow-up.
Excessive daytime sleepiness and an objectively measured sleep-onset latency of 30 minutes or longer had:
- More than 2x the risk of existing hypertension.
- More than 2x the risk of developing hypertension over time.
Speaking of numbers, this was from a respectable sample size (and a good methodology): Dr. Pejovic and her team analyzed data from 1,741 adults, and the 786 participants who did not have hypertension at the start of the study were followed for an average of 7.5 years to determine who developed high blood pressure. Further, every participant underwent an overnight eight-hour sleep study using polysomnography, allowing researchers to objectively measure how long it took them to fall asleep.
You can read this study, here: Excessive Daytime Sleepiness and Prevalent and Incident Hypertension: The Modifying Effect of Objective Sleep Disturbance
As to whether intentional napping can combat this, science seems to suggest that for most people on average neither helps nor harms:
❝Most research suggests that daytime naps do not have a substantial impact on subjective or objective nocturnal sleep, despite sleep hygiene recommendations to avoid naps❞
Learn more: A systematic review of ambient heat and sleep in a warming climate
However, you are not most people, and averages can be misleading (if it helps some people and harms others, a mean average will say it neither helps nor harms; most well-constructed studies account for this, but nuance in individual studies can get lost in large research reviews)
For example:
❝A few exceptions do exist, reporting that, in older adults, daytime napping is associated with more self-reported sleep problems and greater actigraphy-assessed WASO and fragmentation and lower SE.
Others have found that implementing a daytime napping schedule does negatively impact PSG-assessed sleep. Monk and colleagues compared the sleep of older adults following counterbalanced assignment to two weeks of afternoon napping for 90 min/day and two weeks of sedentary control. Self-reported sleep did not differ between the two conditions, but PSG-assessed sleep following the nap condition was worse in comparison to sleep following the no-nap control.❞
PSG = polysomnography
SE = sleep efficiency
WASO = wake after sleep onset
So in other words, if you fall into the (not clearly defined here, likely due to the heterogeneity of studies using slightly different benchmarks) category of “older adults”, it may be better to not nap if you can reasonable avoid it.
Source: The role of sleep hygiene in promoting public health: a review of empirical evidence
Want to nap anyway?
We’re not the boss of you!
However, to get the best out of napping. There are some more things to take into account:
You probably have experienced the difference between:
- “I napped and now I have energy again” and you continue with your day
- “Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time. Stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as the life age of the earth—but it was not the end.” and now you’re not sure whether it’s day or night, whose house you’re in, or whether you’ve been drugged.
These two very common napping experiences are influenced by factors that we can control:
How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)
If you still prefer to not risk napping but do need at least some kind of refreshment that’s actually a refreshment and not just taking stimulants, then you might consider this practice (from yoga nidra) that gives some of the same benefits of sleep, without actually sleeping:
Non-Sleep Deep Rest: A Neurobiologist’s Insights
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Stop Walking on Eggshells – by Randi Kreger & Paul Mason
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
As you may gather from the title, the angle here is not “Borderline Personality Disorder is fine and dandy”, but nor is it something anyone chooses to have, and as such, importantly, this book’s advice is also not “and so you should immediately disown, divorce, defenestrate your partner”, either.
Rather, it has a balanced and compassionate approach that examines both the pitfalls and the possibilities, and provides the tools to make your relationship feel (and hopefully, actually be) safe for all concerned.
And yes, ending a relationship is always an option too, even if it can sometimes feel like it’s not, on account of how the relationships of people with BPD often have a lot of “near miss” situations, nearly ending but not quite, or (in the case of a partner who’s amenable to such), off-and-on relationships—either of which can make it seem like it’ll never truly be over.
First, though, the authors do look at a variety of ways of avoiding that outcome; making changes within oneself, setting boundaries and honing related skills, asserting your needs with confidence and clarity, and dealing with the lies, rumor-mongering, and accusations that often come with BPD. For that matter, the authors do also note that not all conflict is abuse (something that many forget), but on the flipside, how to tell when it actually is, too.
The style is very pop-science, light in tone albeit sometimes heavy in content.
Bottom line: if you or a loved one has BPD, or even just has a lot of the same symptoms as such, this book can be very helpful.
Click here to check out Stop Walking On Eggshells, and stop walking on eggshells!
Share This Post
-
Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Day
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
…and then covers its tracks so that you don’t notice:
Now you see it…
The world you experience is not an accurate representation of reality. Your brain actively constructs your perception, editing your memories as they happen and manipulating your sense of time. What you perceive as the present moment is actually a processed and reconstructed version of past events.
Nor is your vision anywhere near as detailed as it seems. Only a small central portion is in high resolution, while the rest is blurry. Your brain compensates for this by filling in the gaps with its best guess and/or what it believes is there from the last time you saw it. Your eyes constantly make rapid movements called saccades, and during these (i.e. when your eyes are moving), your vision momentarily shuts down—making you effectively blind for (in total, if we add them all up) about two hours every day (according to this video, anyway; our calculations find it to be more than that, but you get the idea). Your brain stitches together the visual input, creating a seamless experience that feels continuous (much like an animation reel composed of still images).
Why does it do this?
It’s because your senses operate at different speeds—light reaches your eyes in nanoseconds, sound in milliseconds, and touch signals in tens of milliseconds. However, your brain processes these inputs together, creating the illusion of a smooth and simultaneous experience. In reality, what you perceive as the present is actually a delayed and selectively edited version of the past.
Instead of showing you the world as it is, your brain predicts what will happen next. In high-speed situations, such as playing table tennis, if your brain relied on past sensory data, you wouldn’t react in time. Instead, it estimates an object’s future position and presents that prediction as your visual reality.
This also means that because your brain effectively sees things slightly sooner than you do, your brain has already prepared multiple possible responses and when an event occurs, it quickly selects the most likely course of action, deleting the alternatives before you are even aware of them. By the time you think you’ve made a decision, your body has already acted.
This goes for more than just the things we think of as requiring quick reactions!
Walking is a complex task that involves multiple time layers—your brain processes past feedback, assesses your current state, and predicts future movements. That’s why it was something that cyberneticists found difficult to recreate for a very long time. If something unexpected happens, like slipping cartoon-style on a banana peel, your body reacts before you consciously notice the danger. Your spinal cord and brainstem trigger emergency reflexes to stabilize you before your conscious mind even catches up.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
This Main Feature Should Take You Two Minutes (and 18 Seconds) To Read ← There’s a problem nobody wants to talk about when it comes to speed-reading; can you guess what it is based on what we just talked about above?
Take care!
Share This Post
-
10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
“Let Them Eat Cake”, She Said…
This is Jessie Inchauspé, a French biochemist and author. She’s most known for her best-selling “Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power Of Balancing Your Blood Sugar”.
It’s a great book (which we reviewed recently) and you absolutely should read it, but meanwhile, we’re going to distill at least the most critical core ideas, 10almonds style. In this case, her “ten hacks”:
Eat foods in the right order
The order is:
- Fiber first
- Protein and fat second
- Starches and sugars last
What happens here is… the fiber perks up the gut bacteria, the protein and fat will then be better-digested next, and the starches and sugars will try to jump the line, but they can’t because the fiber is a physical speedbump and the proteins and fats are taking the prime place for being digested. So instead, the starches and sugars—usually responsible for blood sugar spikes—get processed much more gradually, resulting in a nice even curve.
Add a green starter to all your meals
We know what you’re thinking: “that’s just the first one again”, but no. This is an extra starter, before you get to that. If you’re the cook of the household, this can absolutely simply mean snacking on green ingredients while cooking.
Stop counting calories
Especially, she advises: stop worrying about extra calories from fats, such as if doing an oil-and-vinegar dressing for salad—which she also recommends, because all three components (the oil, the vinegar, and the salad) help even out blood sugar levels.
Flatten your breakfast curve
For many, breakfast is the starchiest meal of the day, if not the sugariest. Inchauspé recommends flipping this (ideally) or softening it (if you really must have a carb-based breakfast):
- Top choices include: a warm vegetable salad, fish, or eggs (or tofu if you don’t do animal products).
- Next-best include: if you must have toast, make sure to have butter (and/or the aforementioned egg/tofu, for example) to give your digestion an extra thing to do.
- Also: she recommends skipping the juice in favour of home-made breakfast smoothies. That way, instead of basically just sugar with some vitamins, you’re getting a range of nutrients that, if you stack it right, can constitute a balanced meal itself, with fiber + protein + fat + carbs.
Have any type of sugar—they’re all the same
They’re technically not, but the point is that your body will immediately take them apart and then they will be just the same. Whether it’s the cheapest white sugar or the most expensive organic lovingly hand-reared free-range agave nectar, your body is going to immediately give it the chop-shop treatment (a process so quick as to be practically instantaneous) and say “this is now glucose”.
Pick a dessert over a sweet snack
Remember that about the right order for foods? A dessert, when your body is already digesting dinner, is going to make much less of a glucose spike than, say, a blueberry muffin when all you’ve had this morning is coffee and juice.
Reach for the vinegar before you eat
We recently did a whole main feature about this, so we’ll not double up today!
After you eat, move
The glucose you eat will be used to replace lost muscle glycogen, before any left over is stored as fat… and, while it’s waiting to be stored as fat, just sitting in your bloodstream being high blood sugars. So, this whole thing will go a lot better if you are actively using muscle glycogen (by moving your body).
Inchauspé gives a metaphor: imagine a steam train worker, shoveling coal into the furnace. Meanwhile, other workers are bringing more coal. If the train is moving quickly, the coal can be shoveled into the furnace and burned and won’t build up so quickly. But if the train is moving slowly or not at all, that coal is just going to build up and build up, until the worker can shovel no more because of being neck-deep in coal.
Same with your blood sugars!
If you want to snack, go low-sugar
In the category of advice that will shock nobody: sugary snacks aren’t good for avoiding blood sugar spikes! This one probably didn’t need a chapter devoted to it, but anyway: low sugar is indeed the way to go for snacks.
Put some clothes on your carbs
This is about olive oil on pasta, butter on potatoes, and so forth. Basically, anything starchy is going to be broken down quickly to sugar and sent straight into the bloodstream, if there’s nothing to slow it down. If you’re wondering what to do with rice: adding a tablespoon of chia seeds to the rice while cooking (so they’re cooked together) will add very healthy fats to your rice, and (because they’ve been cooked) will not seem like eating seeds, by the way. In terms of texture and appearance, it’ll be as though you threw some black pepper in*
*which you should also do for many reasons, but that’s beyond the scope of this “about blood sugars” feature!
Wanting to know more about the science of this?
We’ve done all we have room for here today, but Inchauspé is, as ever, happy to explain it herself:
Prefer text? Check out:
The Science Behind Glucose GoddessShare This Post
Related Posts
-
This Naked Mind – by Annie Grace
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
We’ve all read about the many, many, dangers of drinking. We’ve also probably all read about how to make the change to not drinking. Put things out of sight, tell your friends, have this rule, have this excuse (for not drinking) ready to give to people who challenge you, consider a support group, and so on.
What Annie Grace offers in this #1 bestseller is different:
A blend of mostly psychology and sociology, to examine the “liminal thinking” stages that funnel us to drink in the first place… and where that leads, and how to clamber back out of the pitcher plant we weren’t necessarily aware we were sliding into.
While she kicks off citing Jung, from a psychological perspective more of this book is CBTish, as it pertains a lot to examining the process of:
- belief—held and defended, based on the…
- conclusion—drawn, often irrationally, from the…
- experience—that we had upon acting on an…
- observation—often mistaking an illusion for the underlying…
- reality
…and how we can and often do go wrong at each step, and how little of the previous steps we can perceive at any given time.
What does this mean for managing/treating alcoholism or a tendency towards alchoholism?
It means interrupting those processes in a careful, surgically precise fashion, so that suddenly… The thing has no more power over us.
Whether you or a loved one struggle with a tendency to addiction (any addiction, actually, the advice goes the same), or are just curious about the wider factors at hand in the epidemiology of addiction, this book is for you.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Kiwi vs Papaya – Which is Healthier?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Our Verdict
When comparing kiwi to papaya, we picked the papaya.
Why?
This one was an open-and-shut
casefruit basket:In terms of macros, kiwi has nearly 2x the fiber, slightly more carbs, and (for what it’s worth, which isn’t much because the numbers are small) more than 2x the protein, adding up to a clear win for kiwi in this round—mostly because of the fiber, though.
In the category of vitamins, kiwi has more of vitamins B1, B6, B7, C, E K, and choline, while papaya has more of vitamins A and B9. It’s worth noting that kiwi has (appropriately enough) a lot more vitamin K, while papaya has a lot more of vitamin A (whence the color). In any case, an easy overall win for kiwi on strength of numbers (a clear 7:2 win for kiwi), plus a bonus that we’d prioritize the vitamin K over the vitamin A, as far fewer foods contain vitamin K in high doses (in contrast, so many foods are so high in vitamin A, that it’s almost impossible to be deficient in it unless one is literally starving).
Looking at minerals, kiwi has more calcium, copper, iron, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, while papaya has more magnesium and selenium; another clear win for kiwi.
When it comes to specifically phytochemical considerations, kiwi has more polyphenols, and also some anticancer properties that are special to it, while papaya cannot boast any more than any other fruit in this regard.
Adding up the sections makes a complete win for kiwi, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Can An Alkaline Diet Help You?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small 😎
❝What is the science on eating alkaline foods and minimizing acid foods, does it help against diabetes and/or osteoporosis?❞
The short answer: no
The fuller answer: there are a number of acidic foods that can increase some disease risks—red meat scores highly for many diseases, for example:
- Processed Meat Consumption and the Risk of Cancer: A Critical Evaluation of the Constraints of Current Evidence from Epidemiological Studies
- Red Meat Consumption (Heme Iron Intake) and Risk for Diabetes and Comorbidities?
- Health Risks Associated with Meat Consumption: A Review of Epidemiological Studies
- Associations of Processed Meat, Unprocessed Red Meat, Poultry, or Fish Intake With Incident Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality
- Meat consumption: Which are the current global risks? A review of recent (2010-2020) evidences
However, the issue here is the red meat (or processed meat, or worst of all, processed red meat), not the acidity.
Other quadruped-derived meats (especially from pigs) don’t fare much better in terms of metabolic health risks, but fish is generally considered healthful in moderation, and the jury is out on poultry, but it seems to be health-neutral. For more detail, see: Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy?
But there are other quite acidic foods that are, for most people, at least very healthful. For example: An Apple (Cider Vinegar) A Day…
…which actually has an antidiabetic (or at least: hypoglycemic, i.e. blood sugar-lowering) effect!
And, less acidic but still notably so: Do Tomatoes & Other Nightshades Cause Inflammation & Worsen Arthritis? ← Betteridge’s Law of Headlines strikes again; the answer is “no”.
And in fact, once again, it really does the opposite: Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More ← tomatoes are generally considered anti-inflammatory (not something their fellow nightshades, potatoes, can boast) due to their lycopene content and polyphenols.
So what’s the deal with the alkaline diet?
The British Dietetic Association explained it well in a nutshell:
❝What is it? Supporters of this diet believe that changing the foods they eat, consuming more alkaline and less acidic foods, will help change the pH balance of the blood and reduce health risks. Worryingly some wrongly claim it can treat cancer and that incorrectly ‘acidic’ foods cause osteoporosis.
Our Verdict: Unfortunately, this diet is based on a basic misunderstanding of human physiology. While encouraging people to eat more fresh veggies is a good thing, the pH of your food will not have an impact on the pH of your blood – and you wouldn’t want it to! Your body is perfectly capable of keeping its blood within a very specific pH range (between 7.35 and 7.45). If it fails to do so you would become very ill very quickly and die if not treated! Diet can change the pH value of urine, but testing the pH of your urine just measures the pH of your urine and is not related to the pH of your blood, which cannot be affected by diet.
Bottom Line: It’s alka-lie! You’ll most likely lose weight as you are cutting out processed foods and eating more healthily – nothing to do with acid or alkali nonsense.❞
Read more: British Dietetic Association | Top 5 worst celeb diets to avoid
About the idea of it treating cancer, let’s look to the American Institute for Cancer Research:
❝The alkaline diet cannot change body pH. While it promotes healthy foods like fruits and vegetables, the body tightly regulates blood pH, and diet cannot alter it.
There is no evidence that an alkaline diet can prevent or cure cancer. The tumor environment’s acidity is a result of cancer metabolism, not a cause of it.
A balanced plant-focused diet is best, especially if it’s not too restrictive. Following evidence-based recommendations such as AICR’s New American Plate is a smart approach for overall health and cancer prevention.❞
Read more: American Institute for Cancer Research: Does the Alkaline Diet Cure Cancer?
As for osteoporosis, once again, there’s a clear answer:
❝A causal association between dietary acid load and osteoporotic bone disease is not supported by evidence and there is no evidence that an alkaline diet is protective of bone health.❞
Read more: Causal assessment of dietary acid load and bone disease: a systematic review & meta-analysis
In short: it was an interesting idea, but the science said “no” in every respect.
There are some exceptions
For some people, there can be a health-related reason to avoid acidic foods.
For example:
- Foods For & Against Hiatus Hernia (acidic foods can worsen such)
- Acid Reflux After Meals? Here’s How To Stop It Naturally (shocking nobody, reducing the acids one puts into one’s stomach can help reduce acid reflux).
But, those are things to bear in mind if you are facing those specific health problems, not something to do prophylactically.
Your stomach acid is supposed to be acidic, after all.
It wouldn’t work otherwise!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
