There are a few things that feel as good as napping, but catching a few z’s during the day can also be really good for us.

That’s what we — Raj Punjabi-Johnson and Noah Michelson, co-hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — recently learned when we chatted with Sara Mednick, Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine and author of “The Power of the Downstate” and “Take a Nap! Change Your Life.”

“There’s all sorts of health benefits to napping,” Mednick told us. “The second that you’re going to sleep, you’re actually tuning down that fight-or-flight sympathetic arousal, and you’re tuning up all of the healing restorative processes that occur during sleep, which is run by your parasympathetic system.”

That includes cardiovascular benefits, reducing stress, and balancing our hunger and satiety levels.

“Then, of course, in my lab, what we study is all the cognitive benefits [of napping],” Mednick said. “There’s benefits to memory, creativity, emotional processing, executive function ... so everything that you think about that you like about sleep, you can also get from a nap.”

If you can’t commit to napping, resting while remaining awake is also a great choice.

“You need to rest, but you don’t necessarily — it doesn’t need to look the same [as a nap or sleeping],” she told us. “Rest is so many different things — rest could be exercise, rest could be taking a walk in nature, rest could be doing deep breathing. You need to have that parasympathetic boost, and some people can get it with napping, but there’s a million other ways that you can be getting it.”

While she doesn’t think rest offers the same benefits as sleep, she emphasized it’s still incredibly good for us.

“I’m not going to say being awake is just the same as sleep, because I don’t think it is, but there’s so much benefit to lying down, or sitting up — whatever it is — and just doing deep breathing,” she said. “Just getting yourself out of the grind and the rat race and just getting your body to switch into that parasympathetic mode is so important to do, whether it’s by meditating, whether it’s by taking a walk in nature, or just getting out with your dog, whatever it is that you’re doing — holding somebody’s hand and having a deep conversation — any of these things that make you feel relaxed and safe and that you can kind of breathe nice and slow, those are all incredibly important for our physiology and for our well-being.”

However, if you can sacrifice even a few minutes for sleep, a five-minute nap could be a game-changer.

“The biggest transition that you have every day is the transition from wake to sleep,” she said. “It is such a huge physiological change that, like you go from high heart rate, fast breathing rate, tense muscles to suddenly everything slowing down and your sympathetic arousal system just goes down and your parasympathetic goes up. That transition and just being within that for just five minutes and having just a little bit of stage one sleep and just a touch of stage two sleep can actually reassert your waking alertness state.”

It may boost creativity, too.

“A sleep researcher in Paris has done this research now and she’s shown that these like five-minute naps where you’re literally holding something in your hand and then you let it drop when you finally lose consciousness,” she said.

The study harkens back to Thomas Edison, who allegedly slept for only four hours a night and relied on very short naps for jolts of creativity. The inventor would reportedly nap with a ball of some sort in each of his hands, so when he drifted off to sleep, they would drop and wake him up. “This way he could remember the sorts of thoughts that come to us as we are nodding off, which we often do not recall,” Scientific American notes.

“People see a massive increase in creativity on creativity tests where [the option is] either just stay awake and try to be more creative or have one of these five-minute naps. [This researcher] shows that that is a very creative space. So there’s a lot of mystery going on in how all of this works. Like, we really don’t understand the mechanisms of it, but we do, you know, we can measure that there are benefits.”

We also chatted with Mednick about why so many people suggest taking 20-minute naps, how to fall asleep quicker, the best ways to wake yourself up after a nap and lots more, so click above to hear the full episode or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Make sure to subscribe to “Am I Doing It Wrong?” on whatever podcast platform you prefer so you don’t miss a single episode from our brand-new third season. And check out some of our favorites, including how to apologize or vanquish your credit card debt; how to find love online or overcome anxiety; tips for online shopping, taking care of your teeth and pooping like a pro; secrets to booking and staying in a hotel; how to deal with an angry person; how to make friends as an adult; everything you need to know about protein; getting your best workout; taking care of your car; surviving a breakup; avoiding forever chemicals, plus much more.

You can also watch the full episode on YouTube.

For more from Sara Mednick, visit her official website.

Have a question or need some help with something you’ve been doing wrong? Email us at AmIDoingItWrong@HuffPost.com, and we might investigate the topic in an upcoming episode.

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