Napping is my favorite thing to do. In preschool, I lived for the afternoon naps, and I never stopped taking them. All through high school I took a nap as soon as I got home from school. In my first two years of college I would take almost daily two and a half hour naps, and I questioned whether or not that was healthy for me.

As a nation, the United States appears to be becoming more and more sleep deprived. With 9 to 5 jobs as the norm, we live off of coffee and pills to keep us awake. It may be our busy lifestyle that keeps us from napping. While naps do not necessarily make up for inadequate or poor quality nighttime sleep, a short nap of 20-30 minutes can help to improve mood, alertness and performance. Some famous nappers include: Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Napoleon, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison and George W. Bush.

I turned to the National Sleep Foundation, and found out that apparently there are three different types of napping.

• Planned napping (also called preparatory napping) involves taking a nap before you actually get sleepy. You may use this technique when you know that you will be up later than your normal bed time or as a mechanism to ward off getting tired earlier.
• Emergency napping occurs when you are suddenly very tired and cannot continue with the activity you were originally engaged in. This type of nap can be used to combat drowsy driving or fatigue while using heavy and dangerous machinery.
• Habitual napping is practiced when a person takes a nap at the same time each day. Young children may fall asleep at about the same time each afternoon or an adult might take a short nap after lunch each day.

The National Sleep Foundation also said that naps can leave people with sleep inertia, especially when they last more than 10-20 minutes. Sleep inertia is defined as the feeling of grogginess and disorientation that can come with awakening from a deep sleep.

I learned about the different types of naps, and that I can feel groggy if I take naps for longer than 20 minutes, but that still didn't answer my question, what is healthy napping?

I turned to another online source, Life Hacker.

In the article titled, How Long to Nap for the Biggest Brain Benefits, the writer talked about three different lengths of napping:

For a quick boost of alertness, experts say a 10-to-20-minute power nap is adequate for getting back to work in a pinch.

For cognitive memory processing, however, a 60-minute nap may do more good, Dr. Mednick said. Including slow-wave sleep helps with remembering facts, places and faces. The downside: some grogginess upon waking.

Finally, the 90-minute nap will likely involve a full cycle of sleep, which aids creativity and emotional and procedural memory, such as learning how to ride a bike. Waking up after REM sleep usually means a minimal amount of sleep inertia, Dr. Mednick said on Life Hacker.

There's nothing on the interwebs about napping for over two hours, like I do, but hopefully it's healthy. Because I'm not stopping anytime soon.