Naps for a happy, healthy heart

Napping increases alertness, boosts creativity, reduces stress, enhances your sex life, helps you make better decisions, keeps you looking younger, aids weight loss, elevates your mood and strengthens memory—provided you take it at the right time and place. Recently, a Bangkok municipal office introduced mid-day naps at the workplace to increase productivity. New research from the Harvard School of Public Health and University of Athens Medical School suggests that siestas could reduce heart-related mortality by about one third among men and women. The study that appeared in the 12 February issue of The Archives of Internal Medicine examined 23,681 individuals living in Greece who, at the beginning of the study, had no history of coronary heart disease, stroke or cancer. The results showed that people who regularly took siestas had a 37% lower coronary mortality than those not taking siestas.