Naps

The evolution of napping throughout our lives is probably one of the weirdest things.  From birth until about school age, we're forced to take an afternoon nap.  I say forced because, as far as I have seen, a lot of toddlers are not quite the biggest fans of napping.*

Then, once we start school, napping is fazed completely out of our lives.  And, for elementary school pretty much all the way through high school, this is not a bad thing.  We all have way too much energy and our social lives are way too big to even have time to sleep at night, let alone napping during the day.  Plus, in high school, we're all so busy with school work, trying to get into the college or university of our choice, on top of anything else... Seriously, I don't think I thought of napping once when I was in high school!

And then university starts.  With the option of picking your own schedule, plus the new adventure of living in res and being away from home, usually for the first time, things can get kind of crazy.  And kind of exhausting.  I started occasionally napping in my first year of university and it was a sensation I had never quite experienced before.  And I loved it, at least at the time.

Of course, there are two kinds of people in the world.  In this case, there are the people who can nap and the people who can't.  I quickly discovered that when I woke up from a nap, I felt groggy, disoriented, and usually more tired than before I napped.  If I have an afternoon off, for example, and have nothing difficult I need to do, then a nap is more than welcome (like this afternoon, for example).  However, if I have any kind of work later in the day, a nap will not help me at all.  Some sort of physical activity, even going for a walk, tends to wake me up more and make me more alert than a nap ever will.

It is usually at camp during the summer that this issue is brought up the most.  Each day the counsellors get an hour off, and 99% of the other counsellors use their time off to take a nap.  However, I can probably count on one hand how many times I've used my hour off to take a nap.  I am definitely the odd one out, there's no doubt about that.  But, while napping can rejuvinate some people, it only makes me more tired.  Go figure.

Let me know in the comments how you feel about naps!  Are you pro-napping or does it make you more tired, like me?

Days until camp: 30

xo

*This is honestly something I've never understood.  I mean, if someone told me I had to sleep for a couple hours every day I would be all over that!