Andrew Huberman· PhD
So for people with insomnia, we typically advise against napping.
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So for people with insomnia, we typically advise against napping.
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the strongest evidence comes back to that which we we've mentioned before which is insomnia and really the recommendation there is just avoid naps it's and what's problematic about insomnia when you are having such tough times with sleep at night and you are just dragging through the day it is miserable and I am you know I I'm very protective of my sleep um for the most part I sleep pretty well but I've I'm I'm not immune to the vagaries of sleep I've had two bouts of insomnia throughout my life both have been what we call reactive insomnia reactive to an event or something happening and I know how just desperate and hungry you are for sleep and if it's happening week after week month after month I'll just do anything to get sleep when I can and the Temptation therefore to nap when you are suffering from insomnia is that much higher and therefore the advice is that much harder to adopt but trust me that is one of the components that we have in the psychological treatment bucket that we use for insomnia which is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia or cbti for short
The downside of naps is that it can take away just what you described which is sleep pressure and so the typical recommendation that we have is the following if you are struggling with sleep at night avoid naps during the day
so they're removing all their sleep pressure during the day by taking that nap but they kind of need to take the nap because they're not getting enough sleep so they're in this vicious cycle
We want to extinguish that sleeping during the day thing.
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