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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

The easy way to avoid nap grogginess is to limit then to under twenty minutes.

At some point I read that Edison used to hold a spoon in his hand and have a platter on the floor. When going into deeper the hand relaxes, dropping the spoon, hitting the platter, creating noise to wake him up.

I did this once, but I don't really have a problem with sleep inertia, so I just set an alarm, usually for 15 minutes.

From this perspective the device on kickstarter seems problematic: the goal should be to avoid deep sleep rather than just focus on a gentle wakeup.

I am sure the device will help some people out though and their approach is a lot easier than sleep monitoring.

There are two ways to nap: a quick 20 min nap doesn't take you into deep sleep (characterized by delta wave patterns--google SWS) and let's you wake with much less sleep inertia. It's refreshes, but doesn't consolidate memory. A longer nap (60-90 min) typically takes you into deep sleep, and is harder to wake from. However, a long nap will give you memory consolidation and recovery on par with a full nights sleep.

I thought that was Dali and then he would paint right after waking up from the nap. Maybe both.

How do you guys time this? Whether napping or sleeping it often takes me at least 30 mins to even fall asleep lol (sometimes longer). I will say though that I do get a good 9 hours sleep 95% of nights, so I haven't often felt a need to nap.

I was thinking the same. It takes me 30-40 minutes to fall asleep. When they are referring to a nap in these studies, does it mean full-blown sleep?

This post has a good explanation and some advises:

http://danieltenner.com/post/32895447025/0017-how-to-nap-htm...

I assume I will start napping (sometimes it doesn't seem well defined when a nap truly starts) pretty immediately. After 3 minutes I am going to give up.

Napping is a skill that takes practice, you need to get your body accustomed to falling asleep quickly and consider giving up after 5 minutes. Probably only try it on days when you don't get 9 hours of sleep. Consider intentionally getting less sleep on a weekend day and trying to nap then. Timing a nap after eating a large meal helps me a lot, along with a caffeine let-down.

I wrote a bash script (and somewhat later, a Javascript version) where you press a key and when you release it the timer starts, effectively getting you to sleep just 15 (or whatever) minutes. Also prevented taking more than a set amount of minutes between falling asleep and sleeping. It works pretty well, as long as you sleep close enough to a real keyboard (for Bash) or an iOS device (haven't tested the JS solution in other than Mobile Safari)

Me too. 30 mins minimum, unless I'm very, very tired. The comments below seem to indicate this can be trained though. I hope it's true and I hope I'll have the discipline to train myself. Falling asleep fast would be great. Usually I listen to some boring audio lecture at night and it helps.

kozlovsky has better advice in a link, but I learned during a period of intense sleep deprivation. Enlisted military personnel are famous for their ability to nap anytime anywhere; this is a skill that is trained into them through sleep deprivation during boot camp. Edit: I didn't mean to imply that I'm a soldier, I'm not.

Try breathing like a sleeping person does for five minutes.

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