Napping in Bed
I nap. Sometimes. Mostly, it's been in class -- there's always been something weird about napping at home for me, and I always wake up after a few hours disoriented, dehydrated, and a little dizzy. And now I think I know why.
Usually, I take naps in random places. On my desk (infrequently), on school desks (semi-frequently), in chairs (sometimes), or in car seats (perchance). And these naps are usually short -- whether that be a quick nap or just nodding off for a bit -- and I wake up relatively active: if I was a computer, those naps would be analogous to putting the computer into "sleep" mode, where activation at any time is still possible.
Contrast that to my bed. Almost always, I've Pavlov'd myself to just sleep every time I hit that bed by not doing (almost1) anything else on it -- I don't scroll, I don't read, I don't jump or whatever on my bed, I simply sleep. As such, I've conditioned myself to think of my bed as deep sleep. Given that my bed is the only physical location where I regularly (and often) get deep sleep, whenever I hit the bed, I think my body is ready to sleep deeply.
Which is why it's probably so hard for me to take a good nap in bed. I start napping in the afternoon on my bed, and although my brain thinks this will be a nice small nap in which I'll wake up after a little bit refreshed and with the sun still up, my body is ready and presuming that I'll sleep for a few hours (6+) and as such prepares for such a long sleep.
And as such, when I wake up -- sun down, sweat on my face, dizzy, disoriented, dehydrated -- I've probably interrupted my circadian sleep cycle or something. My brain probably said "shit we gotta wake up" and disregarded the nice deep sleep my body was in and as such I woke up kind of without preparing to, resulting in a nice state as if I had woke up from a nightmare. Scary stuff.
So I guess the next time I want to take a nap I'll do it in a chair or something. Granted, there are ways to produce a different sleep "environment" for my naps -- napping upside down (180 degrees) with my feet where my head should be, napping with different layers (usually I do a quilt + blanket but maybe removing the quilt helps), or the most obvious, napping at a different location.
Whatever the case, if you're tired, a nap might be a good idea.
I do play with stuffed animals on my bed and sometimes sit on my bed for a short duration. But those events happen infrequently; my bed is almost always just for sleeping.↩