The Links Between Napping & Cognition After A Sleepless Night

Have you ever not slept well and thought "It'll be fine, I'll just take a nap later?" Well, as sound as that logic might seem, studies have proved time and time again that you can't really "make up for" missed sleep or sleep deprivation that quickly.

The research, published in the journal Sleep, looked into whether short naps had any impact on cognitive impairment after a poor—or nonexistent—night's sleep. What's a short nap? Anything less than an hour.

In the study, 275 college-age participants were tasked with completing a cognitive test before being either sent home with the assignment to sleep as normal or being asked to remain at the lab overnight.

Those who stayed in the lab were further divided into two groups. One group was allowed to take a 30- or 60-minute nap while the other group wasn't allowed to sleep at all. The next morning, everyone was asked to repeat the cognitive task from the night before.

Slow-wave sleep is the deepest stage of sleep that's associated with "high amplitude, low-frequency brain waves." It typically starts at least an hour after going to bed.

"While short naps didn't show measurable effects on relieving the effects of sleep deprivation," Fenn says, "we found that the amount of slow-wave sleep that participants obtained during the nap was related to reduced impairments associated with sleep deprivation."

Specifically, the researchers found that 10-minute-long increments of SWS during a nap were associated with a 4% decrease in errors on the cognitive test. Though it's not a huge difference, it adds up.

You can never really regain missed sleep, but you can do things to lessen the impact of sleep debt. Napping is, of course, one of those things—but if what you're trying to recover is cognitive ability, a quick cat nap might not make too big of a difference. What's really important is hitting slow-wave sleep, which takes time, so this restorative stage might be hard to reach during a midday snooze.