Naps need to hire a publicist. Not in China, where desk-side snoozes are a constitutional right; Japan, where inemuri (“sleeping while present”) is a sign you’ve been working hard; or Spain, where siestas are woven into the social fabric. But in the UK, US, Australia and many other western countries – where capitalist rat races are fuelled by flat whites and billable hours – naps have a major image problem. They’re linked with laziness and lethargy; with people who can’t be bothered to get through the day.
Yet now is the perfect time to rebrand them as something we associate with a productive lifestyle. Go for a run! Guzzle a green juice! Take a nap! With a large proportion of people working from home (it is estimated that half the UK workforce will still be doing so at the end of 2020), lots of us have more control than ever over what our working day looks like. Our boss overlords have been forced to loosen the reins. Aside from those awkward Zoom team check-ins we’re pretty much free to do as we please as long as we get our work done. Should we so desire, we can take a 20-minute kip after lunch and emerge pin-sharp for a busy afternoon. After all, the sofa is right there, beckoning us over to enjoy a moment of shut-eye.
There are signs people have already started slipping naps into their routines since working remotely. One survey of 2,000 Americans found 33% were napping daily, while another revealed 25% of Brits were doing the same. A social-media sweep I conducted agreed: from LA to Manila, countless professionals in fields including journalism, law and marketing confessed to enjoying a 20-minute zizz. (Personally, I’ve settled on 12 minutes as the ideal duration.)
Yet the numbers would surely be far bigger if naps had a better reputation. It wasn’t always like this. Salvador Dalí, Aristotle, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher – all powerhouses from history, all great nappers. But somewhere in recent decades, naps disappeared from the zeitgeist. These days they feel less “power”, more “cat”. One London-based PR who’s been enjoying mid-afternoon snoozes lately said I could quote her provided I didn’t mention her name. “I’m conscious my work might not yet be on board with the idea of me napping,” she said conspiratorially, adding: “The stigma needs to lift.”
That shift can start now. Presumably the more people embrace naps while working from home at home, the more likely it is that the habit will infiltrate office culture if and when we do return. Given that companies are revising their relationships with employees and rethinking office floorplans, it’s not so farfetched to imagine nap pods sprouting up in quiet corners.
I’m prepared to put my hand up for the PR job and help spread the word, though I confess I have a vested interest: I’m already a serial napper. As a dopey Aussie forever on the verge of drifting into dreamland, I’ve always been sceptical of those who smash eight hours’ sleep at night and power through each day. Being awake for 16 hours straight has always seemed to me like an awfully long stretch of time.
Am I an overgrown toddler still learning how to navigate the grown-up world, or are naps a legitimate tool to make our days more fruitful? As we prepare to enter what could be a golden age of kipping, let’s consider not just how to bump the stigma, but whether it’s worth doing so. Do naps deserve good press?
Napping is at least as old as the Romans, who loved a sexta hora: a sleep in the sixth hour of the waking day, around noon (this became “siesta”). For a long time humans were biphasic, taking sleep over two sessions during a 24-hour period (one in the day, one at night), rather than monophasic, in one night-time chunk. This continued until the invention of the electric lightbulb in the 19th century, which enabled factories to keep employees at work for longer hours, meaning they only returned home at night to sleep.
Yet it’s only recently that naps have been studied rigorously. Dr Sara Mednick was a trailblazer. While a graduate at Harvard in the early 2000s, she made the surprising discovery that “people were showing the same levels of ‘learning’ [ability to identify more information in a quicker amount of time] after a nap as they were showing after a full night of sleep.”
Naps, says Mednick – now associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of 2006 book Take a Nap! Change Your Life – fit neatly into our circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle of our bodies. “When people get this dip in the middle of the day, your body temperature decreases and your cognitive processes are not as strong. It’s usually when people get a coffee, but it used to be when you would take a nap,” she says, speaking to me over Zoom, her pink hair complementing bright red spectacles. “We still have that rhythm inside us that would benefit from a short nap but we don’t live in a world where people feel at liberty to do that – until now.”
When we nap, we redress the balance between our active (sympathetic) and recovery (parasympathetic) nervous systems. Sleep boosts the recovery system, which gives us fuel to be active. Naps have also been tied with bolstering immunity. Quite what effect we get depends on when we nap, and for how long. Dr Nerina Ramlakhan, a London-based sleep therapist, talks me through options. A “power” nap – maximum 20 minutes – means you remain in a “near-sleep state”, but nonetheless emerge mentally sharper. A “recovery” nap lasts 40 minutes and involves light sleep. A Nasa study found it improved pilot and astronaut alertness by 100%. Meanwhile, a “prophylactic” nap is for the severely sleep-deprived and basically involves taking yourself off to bed forever, or until you feel better. Other experts refer to twilight naps, known to university students as disco naps, ahead of a big nightout; and caffeinated naps, in which you down a coffee just before you drift off, for an especially peppy awakening. One full sleep cycle, which includes slow-wave and REM sleep and enhances creativity, takes 90 minutes. The thread uniting naps is that they’re separate from our night-time rest.
I’m given tips aplenty. The best time to nap is between 1pm and 3pm and no later than 4pm, or it might affect your overnight sleep. (Also if you’re struggling to sleep at night, avoid napping.) Don’t stress about actually falling asleep; you can reap benefits even if you don’t drift off. For shorter naps it’s best to sit slightly upright, or lie on top of the covers, rather than diving under the duvet, which will send you into a deeper state and result in grogginess. And set an alarm – unless you’re game to try what’s called a “danger” nap (who says there’s no room to be wild in 2020?).
Given their lethargic reputation, it’s striking that naps are being embraced by certain agenda-setters who trade in optimising performance. Nick Littlehales, an elite-sports sleep coach and author, has worked with Manchester United, Real Madrid and the British cycling team. He wants us to get 7 ½ hours total sleep in each 24-hour cycle, split between night- and daytime slumber. The point is to be flexible, adapting each day depending on schedule and natural rhythms: you could sleep six hours at night and 90 minutes during the day; then seven hours at night with a 30-minute nap. It’s intended to relieve stress. “All our natural recovery breaks have been ripped apart by technology and 24/7 globalisation. This is putting nocturnal sleep, trying to sleep for eight hours in one block at night, under real pressure,” he says, whose approach is applicable to mortals – especially those with flexible work set-ups – as well as footballers. “In today’s world, the multiphasic approach is key to success.”
Littlehales’s language is important. He speaks about naps as proactive, productive tools to ensure we remain in peak shape. He says we need to think about them from “a performance aspect: daytime sleep is a controlled recovery period.”
Such talk chimes with Silicon Valley’s tech titans, who in recent years have installed nap pods (Facebook) and “Shhh zones” (Google). Coming from multi-billion-dollar players obsessed with efficiency, it’s significant. “Think about that: 10 or 15 years ago, if you were caught napping on the job, you could be fired. Now, they’re building facilities to encourage it,” says Dr Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, whose bestselling 2017 book Why We Sleep catapulted slumber to the top of C-suite conversations. “I do think that’s exciting,” he continues, but “are we seeing that transition into the mainstream? No, not yet.”
Why? “Partly it’s the whole ‘time is money’ thing, and revving, revving, revving – the idea that a highly caffeinated society is a working society,” says Mednick. “That’s a very western tradition; the eastern tradition may actually be more holistic.” There’s also the fact that naps might not be for everyone. Much like coffee versus tea or smooth versus crunchy peanut butter, naps are a population divider. There’s no middle ground: people either do or don’t identify as a napper. But can anyone learn?
Genetics dictate our chronotypes – whether we’re a morning “lark” or a night “owl” – and owls tend to get sleepier during the day so are more prone to zizzing. Beyond this, experts seem divided. Some, including Ramlakhan and Cara Moore, founder of UK consultancy ProNappers (who wants to “get the whole nation napping”), insist anyone can become a napper.
Others disagree. Mednick cites a study she conducted that questioned whether people who identified as non-nappers got the same rewards from a nap as nappers. The results showed that non-nappers awoke feeling worse and didn’t get “any” cognitive benefits. She then put the non-nappers through a four-week training programme, but they showed no improvement. “From our study, it doesn’t look like napping is a trainable skill. You either have it or you don’t,” she says, adding that the underlying genetics are hazy but relate to different brains’ electrical impulses. Even so, this only accounts for those people who, genetically speaking, aren’t nappers – it doesn’t cover those who could be nappers, but don’t try due to stigma. Mednick estimates that about half the world’s population are genetically nap-compatible.
A broad cultural shift might depend on what qualifies as a nap. Some aficionados argue that you don’t need to fall asleep, it’s more about closing your eyes, emptying your mind and removing yourself from the rat race – like meditating but with an emphasis on being vacant, not present.
Ramlakhan, who is lobbying CEOs to speak openly about their napping habits and thus remove shame, imagines a future in which it’s acceptable to sit at your desk, “in an open-plan office, wearing your headphones, and close your eyes”. Again, it’s about more than sleep. “The overarching message is we don’t have to be ‘over-efforting’ to be productive. We don’t need to be burnt out and running on adrenaline to demonstrate we’re doing a good job,” she says.
If our working-from-home habits do seep into workplaces, this could be a realistic vision. Here’s hoping. In an era obsessed with productivity, the most productive thing of all might be to shut off our brains and let ourselves drift off.
