Naps Aren't Lazy. They're Smart
In defense of the afternoon snooze.
What do I and my toddler niece have in common? Well, apart from the universal adoration we get from women - we both love a nap. I nap most days, using my lunch hour to sneak in an extra 30 minutes of shut-eye between work sessions. On weekends, I sometimes treat myself to long snoozes after going to the gym. In fact, every night I like to nap for 8 hours straight. To some I’m an iconoclast; to others a visionary.
Sometimes people poke fun at me for prioritizing sleep in the middle of the day. Naps are very child-coded, so it’s a bit odd telling your work colleagues you’ll catch up with them later, only to melt into an office armchair like you’re a dad after a roast dinner. There are even some people (fortunately, none in my life) that consider napping outright lazy. Why take time out of your day to sleep when you could be working hard instead? What are you, 4 years old?
The naysayers may be surprised to see how popular naps are becoming, then. Google, for example, famously had nap pods installed for its employees. People in C-Suites in particular are more likely to get more sleep than the rest of us (no surprise there), with nearly half of them taking regular naps. Why does this happen? If naps are for lay abouts, why does one of the largest companies in the world try to get their employees to do it more, instead of less? If Instagram is telling me success is all about the hustle grindset, why are CEOs snoozing on company time? God who art in heaven, make it make sense! (Fine, but don’t say I never do anything for you).
Why nap?
Most people are familiar with their circadian rhythm, the body clock that winds our brains down in the evening, and gets us into gear in the morning. When your body detects it’s dark, the pineal gland secretes melatonin, a hormone that makes you sleepy. When it’s light, you secrete less melatonin, making you feel more awake. This is why you’ve probably noticed everyone is walking around when the sun is out, and indoors with their eyes closed when it’s nighttime (personally, I always thought that was just a coincidence).
This is all basic stuff. However, what’s not so well known is the circadian rhythm’s afternoon dip.
Data driven nap time. The very best kind.
As the day goes on, your brain accumulates adenosine, a chemical that contributes to sleepiness. In the afternoon, your body temperature drops, and your suprachiasmatic nucleus (good band name) reduces its alerting signals. This makes you less resistant to that adenosine buildup, and results in increased sleep pressure around 1pm - 3pm. We’re able to power through because it’s not as intense as nighttime sleep pressure, but the urge to sleep does rear its head. I’m sure you’ve noticed how at 10am you can tear through your to-do list with no trouble, but by 3pm each email requires herculean amounts of effort. Every “Kind Regards” summoning the sort of heroic drive Edmund Hillary must’ve had when he first summited Everest. If you’re an office worker, you’re the real hero of society (paramedics just don’t get it).
It’s during this window when the power of the nap can be best realised. The problem is, many of us don’t sleep enough at nighttime. Blue light, bedtime procrastination, late dinners, bad mattresses, worry, and rumination - the modern world is chock full of things holding back our natural rhythm. It turns out, having a light up brick with video games and porn on it with you all the time is a good way to keep you wired in the evening.
So, it’s very convenient that we have a window in the afternoon where our body is like “Hey, wanna play catch up?”. Afternoon naps improve memory, vigilance, and executive function. This is why it makes no sense to associate them with laziness. If you nap well, you will get more done. I will bang this drum until the day I die - time at desk is a garbage metric for productivity. Sacrificing 30 minutes to improve your cognitive function for the remaining 4 hours of the day is a total steal. It’s like if you were in a 100m dash, and in exchange for giving everyone else a one second head start, you were allowed to use a drag car.
Doing excel formulas after sleepy time.
Napping also improves your mood, which will undoubtedly have other positive effects (call me crazy, I also think it’s just intrinsically valuable to feel good). People who are happier get more shit done. Now, it might be that people’s moods are being determined by how productive they’re being, and maybe that contributes, but I’d wager it mostly works the other way round. If you’ve ever woken up depressed, you’ve probably found you’re slow off the mark. It’s way more likely for me to get distracted at work because the void comes for us all and my death will be meaningless, than it is for me to enter a depression because I didn’t send enough emails today. If napping makes us happier, it’s no surprise to me we’re more effective after having one.
How To Nap Like A Pro
It’s all well and good knowing we have reasons to nap, but how do we do it, Connor? Whenever we nap, we wake up 4 hours later. We’ve forgotten our middle names. The phone cable on our beds have left imprints on the side of our faces! This doesn’t seem to be the panacea you claim it is.
Well, my sleepy friends, there’s a couple of tricks to the ol’ napping game. First, you have to be disciplined with the amount of time you allocate. Each sleep cycle takes roughly 90 minutes (though it varies from person to person). During this cycle you’ll go from light sleep to deep sleep, and finish on some REM (which is when your eyes dart around like a crazy person, and you dream you “were having lunch with Ronald Reagan, but he wasn’t really Ronald Reagan”).
What you want to avoid is waking up directly from deep sleep. This is what causes sleep inertia, the feeling that it’s hard to get back into your day once you wake up. You’ve gone from 0 to 60 very quickly, and your brain is playing catch up. So, you’ll want to either allocate the full 90 minutes, which is not very practical for people that work, or make use of the power nap.
This is a short 30 minute stint. The goal is to drift into a light sleep and come back up again, thereby reducing sleep inertia while still gaining benefits. If you have an hour free, dedicate half of it to some shut eye, and you’ll find that even skimming the top of a proper sleep is restorative, and your focus will have locked back in. Sometimes, I wake up from these naps sensing that my pre-nap brain was in some serious way insane. My thoughts were muddled, confused, and weirdly urgent. However, just turning the whole thing off and on again closes all those unnecessary tabs, and I regain a sense of clarity.
The second thing to be wary of is watching yourself too closely. You might have allocated 30 minutes, but after 15, you’re still awake. Now you’re doing sleep math, and every second that goes by is one less in the bank. You can (correctly) sense that I’m watching you from afar and tutting at your bad nap skills. The obsession starts, and anxiety begins to bubble up.
Stop doing that.
You can really hear this gif, can’t you?
The obvious reason not to ruminate like that is because it’s interfering with your ability to sleep, and so is counterproductive. However, the other reason not to do that is because you’re wrong. You might imagine that sitting down for 30 minutes with closed eyes, but not actually sleeping, provides no benefits - but that’s not true! You’re not failing at napping, you’re engaging in quiet wakefulness.
This is the fancy sleep doctor term for shutting your eyes and chilling the fuck out. Even without sleeping, quiet wakefulness can improve memory and creativity. So you can comfortably let go of the success or failure of the power nap, knowing that merely dedicating time to sit quietly is still helping you.
This also allows you to stress less about where it is you’re setting up shop. Obviously, it would be great if we could all work for Google and have nap pods in the office, but we don’t because God is real, and he hates us. Instead, we have to make do with what we have. In an office chair, sprawled out on a couch, on your boss’s desk: it doesn’t really matter. I sit on a small armchair in our office corner, stick on my headphones, and go for a ride. It’s not perfect conditions sitting upright like that, but I always come away feeling better, even on the rare occasions I can only achieve quiet wakefulness.
So, the next time your boss asks you why you’re snoring in the corner on your lunch break, tell them you’re maximizing shareholder value. If you are a boss, maybe consider setting up your own nap pod or nap pod equivalent (extra sleep is also why working from home is so good, but I can jump on that soap box another time). Do it for your circadian rhythm. Do it for all the people that need you to be at the top of your game. Most importantly though, do it for me, because I’m right about everything, and my approval is all.