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.↩