Your Guide to Napsgiving and The Food Coma

I am the type of person who can sit down in a comfortable chair or sofa and be sound asleep within 20 minutes. That is just the way I’m wired I suppose, since I’ve been doing it since I was a pre-teen. Naturally, the absolute best time to pull the “mom’s asleep in the chair again” trick is right after a meal, when the table needs to be cleared and dishes need to be done. I did all the cooking, so why should I do all the cleaning up too?

Remember Grandma Betty and Grandpa Lester telling you that it was the turkey you were eating that made you sleepy on Thanksgiving? Mine did, and they blamed it all on an ingredient called L-Tryptophan.  For years I believed that after Thanksgiving, you just had to fall asleep because of the turkey that you ate. Then I tried an experiment, and didn’t eat any turkey at all one year. Same thing happened – out like a light.

What the devil is going on here?

“It boils down to Thanksgiving being a time when people overeat,” Jackson Blatner says. “When people overeat food, the digestion process takes a lot of energy. Don’t incriminate the turkey that you ate,” she says of post-Thanksgiving meal exhaustion, “incriminate the three plates of food that you piled high.” (source)

The Food Coma

I’ve literally known people who would eat teeny meals all week long leading up to Thanksgiving, simply so they “had room” to shovel in all that delicious macaroni and cheese, stuffing, collard greens, pecan pie, sweet potato pie, Mom’s ambrosia, and, oh yeah, the turkey.

So what happens after you inhale all that food? The food coma. Imagine a pony attempting to climb Mt. Everest. That’s your body attempting to operate after the annual Thanksgiving feast. Add alcohol to the mix, or another plate filled with Aunt Fritzi’s baked yams, brown sugar and miniature marshmallow concoction and you’re poor brain hits the DANGER button and sends a signal to the rest of your body to put the fork down and take a nap.

Our friends at Casper.com, created this infographic to help you get the most fantastic Thanksgiving nap of your life this year and to understand the science behind the whole thing. The mattress they created might help with that too! You can check it out here.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our little “Napsgiving and the Food Coma” guide with tips on squeezing in a post-feast power nap. This year, I’m going to be the one taking a power nap while the testosterone carriers clean up the kitchen and wash the dishes.

Hey, a mom can dream, right?