Getting too little sleep has increasingly been linked to not only brain fog and sluggishness the next day, but also memory lapses and even cognitive decline later in life.
One way to limit the ill-effects of nocturnal restlessness is to combine or alternate napping and exercise the next day, according to researchers in Canada, publishing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"People who either completed 20 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise or took a 90-minute nap performed about 22% better on memory tests after 30 hours without sleep than those who did neither,” McGill University said in a summary of the research, which relied on brain scans.
In the PNAS paper, the researchers warned that sleep deprivation "impairs the brain’s capacity to form new episodic memories, which is critical for everyday cognition, future planning, and decision-making.”
"Sleep loss affects nearly every aspect of how we think and function, but many people can't simply stop what they're doing and get more sleep,” said Marc Roig of McGill's School of Physical and Occupational Therapy.
The test results are likely to be of interest to busy people for whom a 90-minute nap is not feasible during a working day.
But a lunch break could be ample time for those who can shrug off the grogginess and push through a 20-minute blast on a bicycle or a 5km run.
"Even a brief bout of exercise may help preserve one of our most important cognitive abilities,” Roig argued, while colleague Madhura Lotlikar pointed out that it is "accessible, inexpensive and easy to implement.”
The researchers highlighted that their brain tests show that napping helped recharge a sleep-deprived brain, but cautioned that exercise cannot replace sleep, even if it can "help people function better when getting enough rest isn't possible."
A workout can "help the brain use its remaining resources more efficiently, without making participants feel more tired," the team said. – dpa
