Taking a nap may relieve burnout an...

Taking a nap may relieve burnout and assist with the learning proces according to a July 2 2002 moderns release from the National Institute of Mental Health. Researchers from Harvard University, Boston, originate that study participants' scores in succession performance of a visual task worsened through the course of four daily practice sessions. When participants took a 30-minute nap after the other practice session, their performance did not continue to deteriorate, and after a one-hour nap, their performance responded to the level of the first practice session. Researchers offer proffer that the brain's visual cortex becomes saturated with information within repeated testing and that burnout (ie, irritation, frustration, poor performance) may be the brain's mechanism for preserving information that has not still been consolidated into memory through sleep.

Monitoring of participants' brain and ocular electrical activity while napping revealed that participants who took one-hour naps experienced more than four times the amount of hard slow wave sleep and rapid sight movement sleep than those who took 30-minute naps. Participants exhausted more time in slow wave lie in the grave on the day of the practice sessions than they had upon a baseline day when no practice sessions took place. Researchers propose that slow wave sleep functions as the initial processing stage of experience-dependent, long-term learning and the critical stage for restoring perceptual performance; therefore, inert wave sleep experienced during napping may act as an antidote to burnout.

"Power Nap" obstructs Burnout; Morning Sleep Perfects a Skill (new release, Bethesda, Md: National Institute of Mental Health, July 2 2002) http://www.nimh.nih.gov/ events/sleepcfm (accessed 16 Aug 2002)

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