Saved by the Siesta: Fight Tiredness and Boost Your Health by Unlocking the Science of Napping

A leading sleep scientist on how to have the best nap you’ve ever had.

Saved by the Siesta explains how siestas work and the remarkable role they can play in overcoming the destructive effects on the brain and the body of a shortage of sleep―for a siesta is like a night’s sleep in miniature.

A daytime nap fulfils all the same functions as a night’s sleep―hormonal, purifying, curative, consolidating, and reinvigorating. It also has the same therapeutic values: it helps us to combat sleepiness, pain, depression, weak immunity, stress, hypertension, excess weight, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

But to take advantage of all this we need to be aware of the siesta’s subtleties: its various types; the correct body position to adopt; the times that are conducive to sleeping; the most effective duration; the stages of sleep that heighten awareness, cognitive performance, memory, and creativity; and how to getting to sleep quickly and wake up without feeling sleepy.

Saved by the Siesta provides all this information, and more. It is a lucid and accessible synthesis of the science of sleep, as well as a practical guide to the taking of naps to overcome disturbed night-time sleep.

Brice Faraut is a neuroscientist specialising in the effects of restricting sleep, leading to new discoveries in the effects of sleep deprivation and people’s capacity to recover from it. He is the author of numerous scientific publications.

Eric Rosencrantz is a freelance translator, who over the years has translated everything from criminal law, music and art history, EU politics, and François Dubet’s Injustice at Work, to documentaries about terrorists and locusts.