I take naps occasionally and wonder if WHOOP tracks them. Do naps count toward my overall sleep and recovery, or are they separate from my nightly sleep score?
Yes, WHOOP can track naps, and they may impact your recovery depending on how they affect your overall physiological state.
WHOOP uses sleep auto-detection to identify nap periods and other sleep episodes. According to WHOOP’s support article, it will automatically detect sleep as short as 15 minutes if certain conditions are met. If you’re lying still and your heart rate and other signals suggest sleep, WHOOP will likely log it as a nap. You can also manually log a nap using the Sleep Coach by tapping “+ Add Sleep.”
Naps don’t count toward your nightly Sleep Performance score, which only includes your main sleep episode. They also don’t directly increase your Recovery score. That said, naps can help reduce your sleep debt and improve your heart rate variability (HRV) or resting heart rate (RHR), which can lead to a better Recovery score the next day. So while they’re not part of the official metrics, they can still be beneficial.
So overall, WHOOP does a decent job detecting naps, and while they’re not part of the main metrics, they can still support recovery in a meaningful way.