The NASA Nap: Could 26 Minutes of Rest Help Your Wellbeing?

After all the excitement around the eclipse, I thought I’d stick with the space theme for a little longer. So, let’s talk about something I sometimes deploy myself: the NASA nap.

Despite the name, you don’t need to be an astronaut, own a spacesuit or have access to the International Space Station. In fact, you don’t need anything particularly sophisticated at all. You just need somewhere comfortable and around 26 minutes.

What is the NASA nap?

The idea comes from NASA research into fatigue and performance. In a study involving long-haul flight crews, researchers found that pilots who were given the opportunity to take a planned 40-minute rest period, during which they slept for an average of around 26 minutes, subsequently demonstrated improvements in physiological alertness and performance.

The findings are often summarised as a 34% improvement in performance and a 54% improvement in alertness. That’s where the famous “26-minute NASA nap” comes from.

It’s worth making an important distinction, though. NASA didn’t discover that exactly 26 minutes is a magic number that everyone should sleep for. Rather, 26 minutes was the average amount of actual sleep achieved during the study.

But the broader message is useful: a relatively short period of daytime sleep or rest can make a meaningful difference when we’re tired.

How to take a NASA nap

You can keep this really simple. Find somewhere comfortable and reasonably quiet. A sofa, armchair or bed is fine. Set an alarm for 26 minutes (I tend to use the famous 26 minutes). Put your phone on silent or Do Not Disturb, reduce the light if you can, get comfortable and close your eyes (use eye mask and ear plugs if you've got them).

Then comes perhaps the most important part: Don’t try too hard to fall asleep.

There’s nothing quite like telling yourself, “I have 26 minutes and I MUST SLEEP NOW” to make your brain suddenly decide it would rather think about something embarrassing you said in 2007. Instead, think of it as giving yourself permission to stop. If you fall asleep, great. If you don’t, you’ve still spent a short period lying quietly, reducing stimulation and stepping away from everything demanding your attention.

When your alarm goes off, get up rather than repeatedly extending the nap.

Why I like the idea of intentional rest

As a counsellor, what interests me about the NASA nap isn’t really the productivity statistics. It’s the permission to rest.

Many of us have become remarkably uncomfortable with doing nothing. We answer messages while watching television. We scroll through our phones while having a coffee. We listen to something while walking. Even our supposed downtime can become another opportunity to consume information or get something done. And when we are tired, we often respond by trying to push through it.

Sometimes that’s unavoidable. But constantly overriding tiredness can leave us feeling irritable, emotionally depleted and less able to cope with everyday pressures.

Rest is not wasted time.

Rest and our emotional wellbeing

When we’re exhausted, everything can feel harder. Small frustrations can become disproportionately irritating. Concentrating becomes more difficult. Decisions can feel overwhelming and worries can become much harder to put into perspective.

Rest won’t solve anxiety, depression, grief, relationship difficulties or the pressures happening in our lives.

But looking after our basic physical needs can give us a better foundation from which to deal with them. Sometimes wellbeing isn’t about adding another strategy, activity or self-improvement task to an already overcrowded life. Sometimes it’s about taking something away.

Twenty-six minutes without notifications. Without emails. Without scrolling. Without needing to achieve anything.

What if I can’t nap?

That’s absolutely fine. Some people fall asleep almost immediately during the day. Others simply can’t. You don’t need to force it. Try treating those 26 minutes as intentional rest instead. Lie or sit somewhere comfortable, close your eyes, put your phone away and allow yourself to be still.

You might concentrate on your breathing, notice the sensations of your body resting against the chair or simply let your thoughts come and go without doing anything with them. The objective doesn’t have to be sleep. The objective can simply be stopping.

A small experiment

If you find yourself hitting that point in the afternoon where your concentration disappears and everything starts feeling like considerably more effort than it should, try an experiment.

1. Set a timer for 26 minutes.

2. Put your phone away.

3. Close your eyes.

4. And give yourself permission to do absolutely nothing.

5. You might sleep. You might not.

Either way, you’ve deliberately created a little space in your day. And perhaps that’s the part of the NASA nap that is most relevant to our mental health. We spend a lot of time thinking about what else we should be doing to look after ourselves. Sometimes our wellbeing doesn’t need us to do more. Sometimes it needs us to rest.

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Written by Paul Madden, a BACP Accredited Counsellor and Psychotherapist offering online and telephone counselling across the UK, alongside in-person counselling in Ashford, Kent.