KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — If you’ve ever taken a quick nap after dinner, or crashed for a long Sunday afternoon snooze, you may be setting yourself up for a rough night. Sleep experts say those naps can easily backfire — but there is a way to nap without wrecking your sleep.
Dr. Abdelhamid Alsharif, Sleep Medical Director at Covenant Health Parkwest Medical Center, said the problem often comes down to timing and how far your nap goes into the body’s natural sleep cycle.
“When we go to sleep, our brain goes into different sleep cycles. There’s two main classes — non-REM sleep and REM sleep,” he said. “We start out into lighter sleep with stage one, and then go into a little more deeper sleep as your sleep progresses.”…