In many siesta countries, taking a regular nap is a normal part of the culture, i.e.: Spain, Mexico. This has several effects:
As you remember, we sleep through certain sleep stages, and sleep cycles. During the first sleep cycle, our body enters deep sleep for the longest period of time, it's at this point that our body temperature begins to drop really low, our respiration, heart rate and blood pressure decreases.
If you've ever been woken up out of “deep sleep”, you know that it’s almost impossible to get up. Waking up during or after a major deep sleep phase makes you feel lethargic, slow, and disoriented i.e.: when you wake up during the night to go to the bathroom, you stroll in there like a Zombie, and don't even remember it the next morning.
It takes about 45 minutes to enter the first deep sleep phase. If you limit your nap to 45 minutes, you will sleep mainly in Stage 2 sleep. Stage 2 sleep also plays a major role in restoring physical energy, as you look at the previous chart, 50% of sleep is spent in Stage 2 sleep. This is why you may have heard before that a simple 10 minute nap can totally re-charge you. If you limit a nap to 45 minutes, you will wake up feeling re-charged, and ready to go.
However, if you take a nap for longer than 1-2 hours, you will most likely enter deep sleep. Your temperature will begin to drop, and you'll wake up feeling very sleepy and disoriented. Also, when you enter deep sleep during the day, you put your body temperature rhythm out of whack, it may be difficult for you to go to sleep later on in the night. You'll have difficulty sleeping deeply at night, which will have negative consequences for the day ahead, such as poor energy, headaches and nausea. Most likely resulting in more naps.
As you see, taking long naps is not the way to go as you can enter a cycle of behavior resulting in poor energy levels and poor quality sleeps. This would affect your health and your life in big ways. Taking irregular naps is one way that sleeping disorders develop.
The correct way to take naps is to keep them ultra short. This will prevent deep sleep and re-charge you physically. Some studies even show that taking short naps can reduce the incidence of coronary heart disease by as much as 30%.
I would personally recommend that you do take a short nap during the day, you'll be surprised at how energized you feel for the rest of the day when you do take one! Limit the nap to 45 minutes, if you still feel tired after the nap,
then shorten the nap time. The amount of time required to enter deep sleep varies from person to person.
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