Are You Reading This During Your 3pm Slump? An Expert Shares Tips On How To Beat It

It’s 9:30 am, you’ve had your first coffee of the day, made your breakfast, and had your first work meeting. You feel energetic and ready for the rest of the day ahead – until, that is, 3pm hits.

Suddenly your work-to-do list feels longer than ever and you could do with an afternoon nap.

It usually happens after lunch and sometime before the end of the work day. You feel tired, sluggish and ready for a sleep – yes, it’s the 3pm slump.

If you’re currently feeling quite drowsy, don’t worry. Sleep physician Dr Abhinav Singh explains that the 3pm slump is a natural circadian dip for all who sleep at night.

“The circadian alerting signal takes a dip for half an hour or so at this time. This is a great time to take a nap or rest to feel more alert and rejuvenated,” Singh says.

However, if you’re sleep-deprived, he says that “you may feel this dip more than others and have a harder time waking from a nap”. If waking up after a 20-minute nap seems difficult, it may be an indicator that you’re sleep-deprived.

This is why some people take a nappuccino – aka drinking a small amount of coffee before a 20-30 minute nap. The caffeine takes effect after they wake and they feel an added boost of wakefulness.

So, why do we start to feel sleepy around 3pm?

Paediatrician and sleep expert Dr Nilong Vyas says there are many factors that can influence it. For example, it can depend on how much sleep you had the night before, if the circadian rhythm is off balance, and what you had for breakfast or lunch.

If you want to try and avoid it, you should start by looking at what foods you had or didn’t have before the slump, she suggests.

“When looking back at breakfast and coffee intake, was there too much coffee drank that morning until noon, for example, and now you feel that slump as the coffee is wearing off?,” Vyas asks. Perhaps your lunch was too heavy, instead.

Or it could be the case that neither of those things happened, but you hit that slump and realised you woke up at 3am briefly and had difficulty falling back to sleep.

“Noticing patterns to help dissect the causal relationship between daily lifestyle habits and sleep behavioural shifts will help to remedy the situational daytime slump,” Vyas explains.

Most adults that sleep for eight hours have a wakeful period of 16 hours. But if you’ve had days of poor or inadequate sleep, your sleep window will probably activate earlier – so you might hit a “wall of fatigue”.

Vyas suggests getting to bed earlier to make up for lost sleep and being mindful of caffeine and alcohol intake too close to bedtime, as that may help prevent the slump and disruption of the sleep-wake cycle.

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