Scientists find some of us are born to nap

Virgin Radio

15 Dec 2021, 14:56

If you're a fan of an afternoon snooze, there may be a scientific reason why.

We all know someone who can seemingly sleep anywhere, anytime, any place.

Now researchers have found it could be due to their biology, which makes some people need more sleep than others.

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) looked into what makes a siesta irresistible to some of us.

Dr Hassan Dashti said in the report: "Napping is somewhat controversial. It was important to try to disentangle the biological pathways that contribute to why we nap."

To find out what makes us count sheep, the genetic information from 452,633 people was analysed by researchers,

The participants were then asked how often they napped during the day. They were offered three choices to pick from - never/rarely, sometimes or usually.

To quantify things further, some of the participants in the group wore an activity monitor - or accelerometer - to gain accurate information about how much they really snoozed.

Looking at the information gathered, the researchers then found 123 regions in the human genome that were associated with napping.

Most of these have already been connected with people who need more sleep, but when they dug deeper three probable napping mechanisms were discovered.

The first two were classified as 'disrupted sleep' and 'early morning awakening'.

These two categories were used to describe those who feel the urge to take a nap because they didn't sleep well, or were woken up too early (who hasn't hated their alarm?)

However, there was one group of people that just simply needed more sleep.

Dr Dashti said: "This tells us that daytime napping is biologically driven and not just an environmental or behavioural choice."

Several napping gene variants were linked to orexin, a neuropeptide that is also linked to wakefulness.

Iyas Daghlas is a co-author graduate student of the study, from Harvard Medical School.

Daghlas said: "This pathway is known to be involved in rare sleep disorders like narcolepsy, but our findings show that smaller perturbations in the pathway can explain why some people nap more than others."

The good news is, the researchers found that the nap really is good for you for when it comes to feeling refreshed and revitalised.