Bad News About Your Mid-Morning Nap

Well, that's your naptime ruined. A recent Cambridge University study has come to an unfortunate conclusion: People who take daytime naps are more at risk of early death. The Cambridge researchers used data from a health study involving over 25,000 men and women based in the UK between the ages of 40 and 79. About 16,000 of these participants took part in the researchers' napping study, which took place over 13 years.

The participants answered questions about their sleeping and napping habits. Ultimately, the study determined that:

• Participants who took a daytime nap for less than an hour increased their risk of dying before age 65 by 14 percent
• Participants who took a daytime nap for more than an hour increased that risk by a whopping 32 percent
• Daytime napping for over an hour was linked to having respiratory illnesses — in fact, they were twice as likely to have them as people who didn't take naps during daytime
• Participants who didn't take daytime naps had the smallest risk of dying before age 65
• Within the study's 13-year period, 3,000 of the participants also died

Well, so much for the benefits of napping.

With that said, we should take the results of this study with a grain of salt. Oh, and we should read the fine print in the study's discussion of the results, which goes as follows:

In the United Kingdom, daytime napping is not part of the cultural norm, and in the absence of obvious disruptions in nighttime sleep patterns, it remains plausible that napping might be an early sign of system disregulation and a marker of future health problems.

The researchers go on to say that they have yet to determine a causal link between napping and respiratory illnesses, and that the results do not necessarily indicate that napping is the culprit — in fact, napping could simply be the response to the adverse effects of illnesses.

Whew. You know what all this stress has made us feel like doing?