Is napping associated with higher mortality?

Can the way an older person naps during the day tell us something about their health – even before anything else shows up?

We tend to think of a daytime nap as harmless, maybe even healthy. But in this study, researchers didn’t rely on people remembering how much they napped. They measured it objectively. This was a cohort of 1,338 community-dwelling older adults from the Rush Memory and Aging Project. The mean age was 81, and about 76% were women. Each person wore a wrist device that tracked their sleep and naps continuously for up to two weeks, so the researchers could see how long they napped, how often, and what time of day.

They then followed these people for an average of about 8 years. During that time, 926 of them – roughly 69% – died. The researchers looked at whether napping patterns predicted who was more likely to die, and they adjusted for the things you’d want them to adjust for: age, sex, body mass index, depression, chronic medical conditions, medications, physical activity, and disability.

The results were striking. Every additional hour of daily napping was associated with a 13% higher risk of dying. Every additional nap per day was associated with a 7% higher risk. And timing mattered too – people who napped in the morning had about a 30% higher risk of death than those who napped in the early afternoon. The researchers described that difference as roughly the equivalent of two and a half years of aging. Interestingly, day-to-day variability in how long someone napped did not predict mortality – it was the overall amount, the frequency, and the morning timing that stood out.

The bottom line: longer, more frequent, and especially morning daytime napping appears to be a marker of underlying health decline in older adults. The important word there is marker. This is an observational study, so it can’t tell us that napping causes anything. It’s much more likely that heavy or early napping is a signal – a visible clue that something else is going on beneath the surface, whether that’s poor nighttime sleep, an emerging illness, or general frailty. Telling a patient to nap less wouldn’t fix the underlying problem, any more than covering a warning light fixes the engine.

What I find compelling about this study is that it used objective, wearable data rather than asking people to estimate their own napping, which we’re notoriously bad at. As more of our patients wear watches and rings that track sleep, we may increasingly find ourselves looking at this kind of data. A patient who has started napping more, or napping earlier in the day, might be worth a second look – not because the nap is dangerous, but because it may be pointing at something we haven’t found yet.

And it raises the next question: if we notice that pattern early, and we go looking, can we actually catch and change whatever it’s signaling? That’s the study I’d like to see next.

Reference: Gao et al. Objectively Measured Daytime Napping Patterns and All-Cause Mortality in Older Adults. JAMA Netw Open 2026;9:e267938