Cardiologist Jorge Tartaglione: “When you nap too much, you get a little bad-tempered”

The afternoon slump between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. is not simply laziness, cardiologist Jorge Tartaglione says. He described it as an inherited biological pattern that modern society tries to ignore: “The 4 p.m. crash is not laziness, it’s genetics, and we fight against that genetics.”

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The 4 p.m. crash is not laziness, it’s genetics, and we fight against that genetics.

Tartaglione said modern schedules make daytime sleep difficult while night-time sleep is often poor. “The reality is that today we clearly can’t take a nap, and we sleep at night and badly. Six out of 10 Argentines sleep poorly,” he said.

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The reality is that today we clearly can’t take a nap, and we sleep at night and badly. Six out of 10 Argentines sleep poorly.

His recommendation for a midday nap is precise: 30 minutes. He warned that sleeping longer raises the risk of obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and stroke. Shorter naps, he said, carry lower risks of obesity and dementia and can improve mood. “When you sleep too much during the day, tell me you don’t get a little bad-tempered,” he said, adding that an appropriate nap “protects the heart.”

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When you sleep too much during the day, tell me you don’t get a little bad-tempered.

Tartaglione linked the afternoon dip to older patterns of human sleep. He said people until around 200 years ago did not always sleep in one uninterrupted block, but often slept in two phases. After an initial period of sleep, they would wake, rest, talk, write, create, paint and have sex before returning to sleep. The modern challenge, in his account, is to preserve the benefits of that ancestral pause without turning it into a health risk.

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It protects the heart.