Perhaps one of the universal constants of any young adult’s life is napping. Between parties, working to pay for school and pulling all-nighters, it’s no wonder that almost any walk through a college campus reveals students stretched out on the grass and benches. Unfortunately, what may be acceptable for a college student between classes quickly becomes anathema for a worker in the modern world, the creed being that healthy, productive adults do not nap.
After all, we’re a culture that celebrates hard work, getting up early and burning the midnight oil. Americans in general lack sleep, getting an average of 6.7 hours a night when the optimal number is eight. We guzzle Starbucks to wake up and pop caffeine pills to keep us up. We’re a culture that subtly looks down on those Mediterranean and Latin American countries that institutionalize the siesta, but recent research may prove that they had it right all along.
A study from the Harvard University School of Public Health and the University of Athens Medical School in Greece published in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that midday napping reduced coronary mortality by about one-third among working men.
The study followed 23,681 individuals living in Greece who, at the beginning of the study, had no history of coronary heart disease, stroke or cancer, and was the first such study to follow healthy individuals and control, in detail, risk factors such as diet and physical activity.
So napping may lower heart disease? I can hear the nay-sayers now: What about those people who say that napping interferes with a good night’s sleep? Well, Sara Mednick of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego argues that this just isn’t true.
“For the most part, the research has found that napping does not interfere with nocturnal sleep unless you have severe insomnia,” she said. “A 15-minute nap at 1 p.m. won’t prevent you from sleeping at 10 p.m.”
In her book, “Take a Nap! Change Your Life,” Mednick also explains how to avoid waking up groggy. There’s an optimum way to nap, according to Mednick: a 20- to 30-minute nap between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
Apparently people like Mednick are starting to change the views of the workplace, just not in our country. Last week the French government pressured companies to introduce a quarter-hour nap after lunch.
“Sleep must not be trivialized,” Health Minister Xavier Bertrand said as he announced the pilot scheme. “Why not a lunchtime siesta? The question should not be taboo.”
The same scheme has been implemented in Bangkok, where the Pathumwan district office has set up a lunchtime nap room with soft music and rules barring mobile phones and talking.
Meanwhile, technology is making napping in public easier than ever.
A company called MetroNaps has designed space age-looking napping pods that it rents out for $14 per 25-minute interval. These pods provide Bose noise-canceling headphones to maintain quiet and, as time expires, orchestrate a “gentle waking with a combination of lights and vibration.” Their “Wake Station” even provides lotion, facial spritz and lemon-scented towels to “bring you back to the real world.” Currently MetroNaps has two pod clusters in New York City and another at Vancouver International Airport, but they also sell and rent their pods to universities, gyms and businesses.
With a history of famous nappers — Napoleon Bonaparte, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and Winston Churchill were all proponents of napping — it’s a shame that the nap has become so maligned in the modern world. I think we should do our best to improve its popularity.