Taking a nap is a technical job, and incorrect posture can cause so many harms!

Source: CNR

Is there anything more embarrassing than waking up from a nap in the office with wet cuffs and a wet desk? It must be because you have drooled and started to burp non-stop...

Imagine yourself sleeping with drooling in front of your colleagues. It's a big "social death" scene. Workers have already started looking at the price of immigrating to Mars.

However, what is more serious than affecting personal image is that sleeping on your stomach can also cause considerable harm to our health. What are the disadvantages of sleeping on your stomach? What is the correct way to take a nap? Today, Pangke will take a look at how sleeping on your stomach can damage your image and affect your health.

Sleeping on your stomach makes you look bad

Waking up with drooling and burping is a bit embarrassing. Want to know how sleeping on your stomach makes us look bad? Then wipe your mouth and read on with Fat Ke!

The saliva we call is secreted by the salivary glands in the mouth. Under normal circumstances, the human body produces 1-1.5 liters of saliva every day, which can fill 3 mineral water bottles we see every day. The lubrication of the oral mucosa and the protection of teeth are inseparable from the role of saliva. When the secretion is significantly reduced, people usually feel dry mouth.

Diagram of the major salivary glands in the mouth

When people are awake, saliva rarely flows out of the corners of their mouths. Why is it that once they fall asleep, they can't control themselves?

Except for infants and a few special cases, most people can actively swallow when awake and will not let saliva stay in the mouth for a long time. In sleep, people's swallowing movements will be reduced accordingly, and the secreted saliva cannot quickly enter the digestive tract, but is more likely to accumulate in the mouth. At this time, whether or not to drool is closely related to our sleeping posture.

Sleeping on your back can cause saliva to gradually gather at the back of the mouth. After a certain amount of saliva accumulates, it can trigger the body's unconscious swallowing action. However, sleeping on the table causes saliva to gather in the front of the mouth, making it impossible to swallow in time. At the same time, sleeping on your stomach will compress the cheeks, squeezing the parotid glands in the cheeks, leading to increased saliva production. "Increasing revenue" and "reducing expenditure", coupled with the fact that this sleeping position will make people involuntarily open their mouths to breathe, it is inevitable that saliva will drip.

Diagram of the mechanism of hiccups in the human body

Most people take a nap shortly after lunch, when our stomachs are full. If we lie down on the table to sleep immediately, our body will lean forward, causing the esophagus to expand, and gas will more easily enter the stomach through the esophagus, irritating the stomach wall. At the same time, the expanded stomach has nowhere to go, so it can only press on the diaphragm. After waking up, the diaphragm is suddenly "liberated", which makes it easy for involuntary spasms and contractions to occur, resulting in hiccups.

Save time and health

During the lunch break, you can just lie down and get back to work immediately after waking up. This really saves a lot of time, especially for many office workers who value time like gold. Compared with the time saved, sacrificing personal image is no big deal.

But what if the time saved at noon comes at the cost of our health? Studies have shown that sleeping on your stomach for a long time may be a trigger for many diseases.

After falling asleep, the body's blood flow and heart rate gradually slow down, and the posture of sleeping on the table can easily compress the heart, lungs, carotid arteries, gastrointestinal tract and other organs, increasing the burden on the heart and lungs; in addition, at this time, everyone has just finished lunch, and the blood flow to the digestive tract increases, which can make it easier to cause insufficient blood supply to important organs such as the brain and lungs.

Therefore, when you wake up from a nap at your desk, you often experience symptoms such as dizziness, tinnitus, and difficulty breathing, which are manifestations of ischemia and hypoxia in major organs. If things go on like this for a long time, it will not only easily induce cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, but also affect digestion and lead to digestive system diseases.

Lying on the table for a nap will cause the neck and spine to be twisted for a long time, which can easily lead to excessive fatigue of the neck and waist and back muscles, and induce cervical spondylosis, lumbar muscle strain and scoliosis. This is undoubtedly a double whammy for many workers who have already had unhealthy cervical spine and waist and back due to long-term use of mobile phones and computers.

Schematic diagram of the ulnar nerve

At the same time, the posture of taking a nap at a desk requires the elbows to bend outward significantly. The head and the desk simultaneously exert pressure on the "numb tendons" in the elbows, which can easily cause damage or lesions to the ulnar nerve located there, leading to muscle atrophy, finger soreness and numbness and other symptoms.

In addition, the posture of resting the head on the arm may compress the eyeball, resulting in obstruction of blood flow to the eye, increased intraocular pressure, and a certain degree of damage to the eye. Especially for glaucoma patients and people with high myopia, this sleeping posture should be avoided as much as possible.

Lunch break is a technical job

Having said so much, what is the correct way to take a nap?

The best way is to change the habit of taking a nap at a desk. It would be best if you can lie down and rest for a while in a dark and quiet environment. If you don't have such rest conditions, you can also adjust the height of the seat or add cushions to the table to minimize the bending of the upper body and relax the body.

In addition, there are many details that need to be paid enough attention. First of all, taking a nap immediately after lunch is not conducive to food digestion. The correct way is to walk around properly after lunch and then take a nap.

Moreover, the nap time should be controlled within 15-30 minutes. The "long sleep without waking up" nap that many people like is not the best solution for a midday rest. Once the sleep time is too long, the human body will enter a deep sleep, and there will be obvious discomfort when waking up, which is more likely to produce "morning grumpiness", thus affecting the working state of the whole afternoon. Especially for many people engaged in complex and dangerous work, it may also cause more serious consequences.

Compared with working blindly, combining work and rest is more conducive to improving our work and study efficiency, so for us, learning how to rest is a compulsory lesson.

Creative team: China Science and Technology Museum New Media Team

Review expert: Wu Xinsheng, deputy chief physician of the Department of Gastroenterology, PLA 371 Hospital