Notes from the House

A power nap, and how long is actually useful

Short beats long, and the reason is boring

Sleep isn't one thing. It moves through stages, and the deeper stages are harder to come out of. A nap that stays in the light stages tends to end cleanly. A nap that reaches the deep ones tends to end with that thick, drugged feeling where you're worse than before you lay down and it takes an hour to shake.

That grogginess has a name, sleep inertia, and avoiding it's most of the reason short naps are recommended. Roughly speaking you've about twenty to thirty minutes before you're into the territory where waking up gets unpleasant.

So the practical version is: set something for twenty minutes. If you fall asleep, good. If you don't, you've still been lying down in the dark, which isn't nothing.

The longer option is the full cycle, around ninety minutes, on the logic that you come out the other side rather than being pulled out of the middle. It works for some people. It also costs ninety minutes, which most people don't have in the middle of a Tuesday, and it's easier to get wrong.

What to put on

Nothing that ends.

This is the specific mistake. People put on a twenty minute track thinking the ending will wake them, and instead the silence arrives and they surface for it, or the track ends and autoplay serves them something with a beat in it.

Use a long continuous thing and a separate alarm. The sound is for getting down. The alarm is for coming back.

The daytime problem nobody mentions

Napping in the day is harder than sleeping at night for reasons that have nothing to do with tiredness. It's light. There's noise that belongs to other people's activity. And there's a low background sense that you're supposed to be doing something, which doesn't switch off just because you've lain down.

Sound helps most with the third one, and it's worth being clear that this is the actual job. Something continuous gives the room a floor, so the quiet isn't full of the house going on without you.

If you want the case for why wordless and unchanging works better than a nice song, it's in ambient drone music.

If you do not sleep

Most people don't, the first several times. Lying down for twenty minutes with your eyes shut and something steady on is still a real rest, and treating it as a failed nap is what makes people stop trying.

Set the alarm, put it on, close your eyes, and let whatever happens count.

The app holds the same sound in shorter shapes, which suits this better than most things we make, because a nap is one of the few situations where the length genuinely matters.

If the reason you need the nap is that the night went badly, music for deep sleep is the more useful page. If it's the middle of the day and sleep isn't the point, try nervous system regulation.

SOVA Within · sound for coming back to yourself