There has been more than one occasion when I, totally sleep deprived (thanks to a winning combination of insomnia and small children), have idly considered if I can get a room in central London for an hour. Not for anything half as fun as what the receptionist might think. Just to get a bit of shut eye.
At home, I’m a pro napper. It’s literally the only way to function when I’ve had a night of four or five hours’ sleep. But on a day when I have meetings out all day, I start to flag. Until I stumbled upon luxury wellness clinic, Le Petit Saint in Mayfair, whose clients include Rita Ora, Elle Macpherson and Saffron Hocking. During a tour of the clinic, I saw an egg-shaped capsule with a reclining chair: a nap pod.
Two weeks later, I came back for a nap. It was well-timed; my five-year-old had had nightmares all night, and I’d been huddled in her bed with her, awake all night. Once I was lying down on the chair, reclined at a precise angle, a screen gently folded over the front of the pod to block the light, and a low vibration hummed through the base. Meanwhile a soft soundscape filled my headphones. I found my mind racing to begin with, before I drifted off into that kind of soporific haze where everything from your cheek jowls to your calves feel heavy and you can’t move a muscle. Not exactly a nap, but deep, deep relaxation.
I was eased back into consciousness, feeling as if someone had pressed a reset button in my brain
Twenty minutes later the music upped its tempo and the chair started gently vibrating, as I was eased back into consciousness, feeling as if someone had pressed a reset button in my brain.
Le Petit Saint is famed for its hi-tech recovery treatments, including its signature £950 Red Carpet Facial loved by A-listers, but it is the EnergyPods — made by New York-based MetroNaps and inspired by Nasa technology — that are its local regulars’ cheeky secret. Peak times are after lunch, but also morning sessions for frequent flyers looking to battle jet lag.
“The EnergyPod works by engineering the conditions that the brain needs to transition into the earliest, lightest stages of non-REM sleep without crossing into slow-wave or deep sleep, which would leave you groggy,” says Dr Raul Cetto, medical director at the clinic.
The pods have been designed to achieve nap nirvana both from the physical position you lie in — “the zero-gravity reclined posture which can alone accelerate sleep onset” — to the acoustics which “suppresses those startle-driven surges that would otherwise interrupt sleep onset,” to the light-blocking visor which tells our master clock to shut down.
At the end of the 20 minutes, the upbeat music, gentle vibration and light then engages the brain’s arousal pathways, prompting it to dial the cortisol back up, “producing a clean, non-disoriented awakening”.
It speaks volumes about our levels of stress and poor night time sleep that spending £110 on a nap is even in the realms of possibility for some. But there are some serious gains. According to Nasa research, a 26-minute power nap can increase alertness by 54 per cent and cognitive performance by 34 per cent. “A 20-minute nap has been shown in multiple studies to produce significant improvements in reaction time, vigilance, logical reasoning and mood — effects that can last two to three hours,” Cetto says.
Naps — even in hi-tech pods — are not designed to replace good quality night time sleep. “Sleep deprivation is not trivial,” Cetto says. But a well-timed nap can help you feel semi-human again. “Think of it as defragmenting the RAM, rather than replacing the hard drive,” he says.
EnergyPod sessions from £110; lepetitsaint.com
