Take a Nap! (At least Michelle Petri says so)

Dr. Michelle Petri, one of the most formidable lupus doctors in the world, says that because of lupus fatigue, you may need to take a nap in the afternoon. She says if your body tells you to nap, you need a nap. So take the nap, she says. Direct orders from the doctor! Her advice came during her informative and enjoyable presentation at last year's LFA Annual Maryland Summit at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Be sure to mark your calendar for this year's event - Saturday, Sept 13, 2014, and view details here. Dr. Petri will be returning as a presenter, and I'm sure she'll still be encouraging us to nap!

On the heels of doctor's orders, I thought I'd share this article on napping. I enjoyed the article - but noted that some theories and/or strategies simply don't apply. For those of us who rely on upwards of an hour nap to fight lupus-induced fatigue, the theory that a 10-minute nap is ideal just won't work. But there are still some interesting take aways, including the selection I've pasted below, showing that an hour nap is ideal for memory and learning. Read that snippet below, and you can read the entire article here.

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In a 2012 study in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, researchers split 36 college-aged students into three groups. Each group learned a memory task, pairing words on a screen with a sound. Afterward, one group had 60 minutes to nap, another 10 minutes. The final group didn't sleep.

Upon retesting, the napping groups fared better, as expected, said Sara Alger, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame.

More interesting, she noted, was that on further testing, including a week later, the 60-minute group performed far better than the 10-minute group, which now performed as poorly as the non-napping group. The researchers concluded that slow-wave sleep—only experienced by the 60-minute nappers—is necessary for memory consolidation.
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