There are few things in this world better than a nap.

Sure, a solid eight-hour sleep is a thing of beauty, but you can’t exactly crack one of those post-lunch and expect to be productive.

You’ll find thousands of articles online about how to perfect the art of the nap, but I was pretty taken aback to learn that many in the know recommend the ‘nappuccino’.

Basically, that’s drinking a cup of coffee (make sure it’s quality coffee, please) and then taking a quick nap, and is also referred to as a ‘coffee nap’.

Unlike that idiot anti-vaxxer parent at your child’s school who gets all their info from Facebook, there’s science to back this one up, too.

Vox covered the how and why of it all:

To understand a coffee nap, you have to understand how caffeine affects you. After it’s absorbed through your small intestine and passes into your bloodstream, it crosses into your brain. There, it fits into receptors that are normally filled by a similarly shaped molecule called adenosine.

Adenosine is a byproduct of brain activity, and when it accumulates at high enough levels, it plugs into these receptors and makes you feel tired. But with the caffeine blocking the receptors, it’s unable to do so.

…here’s the trick of the coffee nap: sleeping naturally clears adenosine from the brain. If you nap for longer than 15 or 20 minutes, your brain is more likely to enter deeper stages of sleep that take some time to recover from. But shorter naps generally don’t lead to this so-called “sleep inertia” — and it takes around 20 minutes for the caffeine to get through your gastrointestinal tract and bloodstream anyway.

So if you nap for those 20 minutes, you’ll reduce your levels of adenosine just in time for the caffeine to kick in. The caffeine will have less adenosine to compete with, and will thereby be even more effective in making you alert.

Wake up from your 20-minute nap and boom, you are ready to take on the world. Try not to dos on your actual laptop, though, like that chap above, because I feel like your physio might have stern words for you.

Scientists, in a number of studies, have directly observed the effects of coffee naps, with experiments showing that they’re more effective than coffee or naps alone, in terms of maximising alertness.

Then there’s this, from a study in Japan:

…people who took a caffeine nap before taking a series of memory tests performed significantly better on them compared with people who solely took a nap, or took a nap and then washed their faces or had a bright light shone in their eyes. They also subjectively rated themselves as less tired.

Look, I don’t need another excuse to smash some daytime shut-eye. Let’s run through your perfect nappuccino checklist:

• First, drink coffee.
• You need to drink it quickly, to give yourself a decently long window of time to sleep as it’s going through your gastrointestinal tract and entering your bloodstream.
• Right after you’re finished, immediately try to go to sleep. Don’t worry if it doesn’t come easily — just reaching a tranquil half-asleep stage can be helpful.
• Finally, make sure to wake up within 20 minutes, so you don’t enter the deeper stages of sleep and you’re awake when the caffeine is just starting to hit your brain.

I’d add a final, and very necessary caveat – drink tasty, high-quality coffee.

You’re welcome to make that call yourself, but there’s only one business that can lay claim to being the oldest roasting brand in the Western Cape.

Thankfully, Importers Coffee is still going strong as the biggest coffee roaster in the Western Cape, with the most experienced team of roasters, who are still roasting by hand on machines as old as some of your parents.

In the age of bespoke this and artisinal that, they’re making the good stuff the way they always have, and that’s just fine by us.

If you happen to pop past their shop in Newlands, you’ll see we’re not alone. Maybe save the nappuccino for when you can use the Importers Coffee capsules at home, and enjoy the buzz of the Southern Suburbs’ most popular coffee shop while you’re there.

May all of your nappuccinos be glorious.

[source:vox]