Closing your eyes in the middle of the day is often treated as a luxury or even a guilty pleasure. But from a nervous system perspective, a short daytime nap of 20–30 minutes is actually deep, restorative self-care—good for your health on many levels.
I love napping (almost as much as Craniosacral Therapy) because it carves out a pocket of space-time to slow down, unwind, and just be without the pressure to do anything. It reinforces that your energy matters to other people, and that you're better for yourself and everyone else when you're resourced. And, as it turns out, your brain and heart love it just as much as you do.
Here's what is happening when you give yourself permission to pause:
Replenishing Your Mental Capacities
Did you know that your central nervous system tracks how long you have been awake using a neurochemical called adenosine? As your brain consumes energy throughout the day, adenosine builds up in your synapses.
When those levels get too high, they plug into your brain's receptors and slow down neural firing. This is the moment you hit that classic 3pm afternoon slump. You start to feel spacey, your eyelids get heavy, and you might feel like you are hitting a wall. It is your body’s brilliant way of saying: time to unplug and recharge!
Even a brief 20-minute snooze allows your brain to rapidly clear out accumulated adenosine. By freeing up those receptors, you replenish your mental bandwidth, regaining mental clarity, faster processing speeds, and a fresh wave of focus.
Down-Shifting Out of Survival Mode
Your nervous system communicates constantly with your endocrine (hormone) system to manage stress and your body's homeostasis and functioning. When you experience a stressor—whether it's external from work, caretaking or the news, or internal from tiredness, pain, people pleasing, or pressure on yourself to push through that midday slump—cortisol shifts your nervous system into sympathetic "fight/flight/fawn" activation to keep you "on" as best it can.
This is how cortisol gets you through, and some of the costs:
- Energy Dump: It signals your liver to release extra sugar into your bloodstream, providing fake "anxious energy" that leads to a crash or deep sense of depletion later.
- Brain Hijack: It activates your brain’s fear center and inhibits your prefrontal cortex, making you hyper-reactive, irritable, and extra sensitive to potential threats or problems (including the internal experience of discomfort or pain), while also making creative thinking, concentration, patience and empathy much more difficult.
- Priorities: It dials down "non-essential" systems, inhibiting your digestion, halting tissue repair, suppressing healthy immune function, and libido, while increasing heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension.
- Sleep Block: Cortisol stays elevated into the evening, blocking melatonin (your sleep hormone) so you might feel exhausted but unable to fully relax or sleep well at night, contributing to the dreaded "wired and tired" cycle.
Fortunately, even a brief nap acts as an autonomic nervous system reset. It gently down-shifts your body out of sympathetic "on" mode and hands the steering wheel back to your parasympathetic nervous system (your rest-and-digest, tend-and-befriend state).
When your parasympathetic system takes over, it:
- Slows your heart and breathing rates
- Relaxes your arterial walls to lower blood pressure
- Pauses excess cortisol and norepinephrine production
- Decreases systemic inflammation
- Boosts healthy, calm digestion
- Decreases anxiety and increases overall emotional and mental capacity
The Proven Benefits of a Quick Rest
Giving your body this daily intermission yields major long-term health payoffs:
Emotional Regulation: Dropping your cortisol levels instantly softens your mood, lifts daytime fatigue, and gives you more mental and emotional bandwidth to handle daily stressors (check out the link at the bottom for more ways to complete stress cycles).
Brain Longevity: A review of 54 studies confirmed that afternoon naps definitively sharpen verbal memory, processing speed, and alertness. Plus, a 2023 study from University College London found that regular nappers have larger total brain volumes!
Cardiovascular Support: Research from the American Heart Association and Harvard Health shows that these brief periods of rest significantly lower blood pressure, giving your hard-working heart a much-needed break, and contributing to a lower risk of heart disease.
Best Practices for the Ideal Reset
To get the healing benefits without the daytime hangover, keep these quick guidelines in mind:
Keep it short: Stick to 20–30 minutes. Set a timer! This gives you the benefits of light sleep without letting you drop into deep, slow-wave sleep. If you sleep too deeply, you wake up with "sleep inertia"—that groggy, disoriented feeling where you don't know what day it is.
Time it right: Aim for the early afternoon (typically between 1pm and 3pm) when your body experiences a natural circadian dip in alertness. Avoid napping after 4pm so you don't disrupt your nighttime sleep cycle.
Note: While brief naps are healthy, frequently needing to sleep for over an hour during the day can be a warning sign of underlying health imbalances (like blood sugar or blood pressure issues). If you find yourself regularly needing long daytime naps, it is a good idea to check in with a doctor.
Tips & Tricks
If you are struggling to find the time, or find it challenging to nap in general, try these gentle ways to support yourself:
1. Put it in your calendar: If you work for yourself or have control over your schedule, intentionally block out an extra 20-30 minutes during your lunch break specifically for rest. If you're struggling with afternoon energy or burnout, you might talk with your boss about extending your midday break so that you can perform and feel better.
2. Set yourself up: Find your place—a break room, your bed, yoga mat, couch, your car, a nook in a nearby park. Have a "nap pack" with headphones, earplugs, an eye cover, a blanket or whatever you need to get comfortable.
3. Guided relaxation: If dropping in on your own is challenging, try a guided meditation, like yoga nidra body scan or a sleep story to help you drop in. Bookmark your favorites so you don't have to spend time searching or deciding when you're short on bandwidth and time.
4. Co-regulation and surrender: One of the reasons craniosacral therapy and gentle bodywork helps us relax so deeply is that we get to feel nourishing touch and be in the presence of another relaxed nervous system. Someone else gets to hold the space and hold us. Try napping with an animal or human companion.
5. Self-touch and tuning into okayness: Make part of your ritual of entering naptime a moment to tune into yourself and your body sensations, especially the ones that feel grounding and okay (your back supported, toes in your socks, fingers rubbing together). You might include some self-presencing touch, massage, stretching, pandiculating or embracing inner psychological parts that could use some acknowledgement.
6. Embrace the weekend siesta: A few times a week is better than no times per week. If weekdays are too chaotic, make naptime your favorite weekend self-care ritual.
Your nervous system is always listening, and sometimes the most productive thing you can do for your health is to give yourself a break.
Can't seem to turn the alarm bell off?
If you are caught in a chronic cycle of stress and/or pain, your cortisol levels might be staying chronically elevated. When your body forgets that it's safe to down-shift into that peaceful parasympathetic state, even a nap can feel impossible. This is exactly where hands-on bodywork like Craniosacral Therapy comes in. By directly supporting both the physical structures of your central nervous system and creating a safe enough, calm co-regulatory container, we signal your brain that it is safe to turn off the cortisol alarm, and finally return to balance.