This way, children, and hear me tell
Of Rip Van Winkle’s wonderful nap,
The oddest fortune that ever befell
A merry and good-for-nothing chap;
Of all the snoozes and slumbers deep,
The strangest, longest, and strongest
sleep!
–Edmund Clarence Stedman, Rip Van Winkle and His Wonderful Nap (1870)
“When do you fall asleep? I guess in our prehominid days, the nighttime was a time when it was best to go to bed. That’s not necessarily so in secularized urbanized cultures, right?”
Marcel Danesi, anthropology professor at the University of Toronto, weighs the effect of the digital age on the way we sleep — effects that have been at work since the invention of artificial light.
Technology changes sleep patterns. You work when you can, and sleep when you’re not working. Shorter stints of sleep — or naps — seem like the natural solution. Yet for a culture where technology permits a flexible daily rhythm, we still cling to the monophasic sleep cycle of solar-driven workers.
The nap is a touchy subject at best. Both the symbol of sun-dappled repose, and the cardinal sign of indolence, naps maintain an equivocal status in contemporary Western culture. While a long history of scientific research has pointed to the clear benefits of a midday’s rest, a recent spike in media coverage has begun to change the nap’s reputation.
In 2003, Harvard psychology graduate student Sara Mednick reported her finding that naps of 90 minutes improve participants’ learning of perceptual tasks, in the same way as a full night’s sleep. The article was published in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience, where it catalysed a new fascination with the nap in the popular press.
Mednick is now an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego where she researches the benefits of napping on learning, creative problem solving, and verbal memory. In her self-help book, Take a Nap! Change Your Life, Mednick explains the merits of napping, pointing out that humans are naturally predisposed to biphasic sleep — that is, we’re biologically inclined to sleep in two major phases, both at night and during the day.
James Maas, a seasoned sleep researcher at Cornell University, is well-versed in the benefits of an afternoon slumber. As the man who coined the term “power nap,” he warns against the lingering assumption that napping is a sign of idleness.
“Any time in our technological society when people are sleeping and not working, as a public, we feel that that’s a sign of laziness. And nothing could be further from the truth. Napping during the day is a sign of sleep deprivation — which is extremely dangerous.
“Not only are you drowsy during the day, at inappropriate times, but you’re irritable, anxious, depressed, likely to gain weight, and at a much higher risk for hypertension, heart attacks, strokes, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and even cancer. It also affects our cognitive processing; we can’t remember, we can’t concentrate. We lose our critical and creative problem-solving skills.”
Napping, which is decidedly frowned upon, even in a culture where sleep deprivation has become the norm, can in fact lessen the effects of sleep loss.
“We know that it refreshes the body and the mind,” says Maas. “It’s not as good as solid nocturnal sleep. But people who do take power naps of a short duration seem to be more alert.”
Aside from simply countering the effects of sleep deprivation, however, napping also has added benefits. Julien Doyon, a professor at the Université de Montréal explains that learning new motor sequences — as in the case of playing the piano, or learning a sport — is facilitated by a short sleep stint.
“What we find is that one can learn a new skill if you sleep for a period of 90 minutes. Then, when you return to the task, your performance will be better than if you didn’t sleep. That means that naps help with the consolidation of this process.”
It should come as no surprise then that Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Napoleon Bonaparte were distinguished nappers.
In fact, so is Toronto-based trader Bruce Lyon. Lyon started napping in 1974, after coming across a series of studies on the virtues of the nap. “It wasn’t a difficult habit to pick up,” he says.
When Lyon began his journey into naphood he worked on a film set with irregular shifts, often starting work when others were heading to bed. Being able to nap during the day was a necessity. “It allows you to pace your day differently.”
In particular, Lyon highlights the benefits he reaps artistically by taking time to snooze in the afternoon. “Creatively there was a distinct difference. I could access my creative energies. I started writing, started many projects. […] There’s a different kind of wakefulness at 10:30 at night.”
After years of experience, he has now mastered the nap. “I find my optimal time for napping is between 2 and 5 p.m. I put on comfortable clothes and get into bed. I definitely nap three to six days of the week.”
Lyon has had mixed responses from family and friends about his lifestyle. “When people think you’re goofing off because you nap, they don’t think about the fact that, hey, I’m getting up earlier than you and staying up later. But I think I’ve been able to convert a lot of people to nap.”
Now that his shift to trading work leaves him with a rigid 9 to 5 schedule, Lyon says that getting in a nap at the end of the workday is his first priority. “If I had my druthers, I would nap every day.”
As for his response to the groggy after-effects that so often tarnish the nap’s reputation, he says, “So what? I’m groggy when I get up in the morning too, but you get out of it and it’s worth it in the long run.”
According to Marcel Danesi, napping appears unpopular partly because of the work-driven ethos of Western culture. Even the term “nap” is stigmatized. “If you change the name ‘napping’ to ‘afternoon rest’ it changes the whole nature of the game, doesn’t it?”
Has this always been the case? According to Roger Ekirch of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, it would seem the answer is yes. A specialist in pre-industrial Britain, Ekirch explains that napping, and “excessive” sleeping in general were “disapproved of, but tacitly accepted.”
Sleep during the day offended middle-class morality in particular, Ekirch continues. “This was coupled with the belief in the Protestant faith that when people were asleep they were thought to be most vulnerable to the devil and Satan’s minions, including witches.”
Yet, for all of its ill fame, Ekirch says the nap was a favourite theme amongst painters in the 17th and 18th centuries. The work of William Hogarth provides a wealth of etchings depicting people of all classes, most notably a judge, falling asleep at the bench. Dutch painters in particular often depicted scenes in ale houses where a person, usually female, was napping. The napper was subject to ridicule as fellow patrons made odd gestures above her head.
In today’s fast-paced culture, where many may struggle with post-lunch fatigue, some have found alternatives to dealing with the afternoon onslaught. Spain is known for shutting down businesses, offices, and restaurants come 3 p.m., all for the purpose of going to bed. The siesta is a prominent part of Spanish culture and daily living. Or at least it once was.
Cambridge Professor Brigitte Steger has done extensive research on sleep, using a cross-cultural perspective. Steger describes three distinct sleep cultures: monophasic, siesta, and napping. In monophasic sleep culture there is one major sleep phase in the night, whereas the siesta culture also includes a socially agreed-upon time in the afternoon to sleep or remain quiet. The third, which she refers to as napping culture, is where people take their naps whenever it is convenient and practical.
Steger says that the siesta culture is slowly retreating, particularly in the Northern and urban parts of Spain. Increased communications with other European countries necessitates adjusting to other nations’ daily schedules. Steger also mentions that the siesta is currently developing an old-fashioned or “backward” connotation.
While the siesta may be under fire, sleep continues to flourish elsewhere. Steger places Japan in the “napping culture” category, though the Japanese have another word for it. The term used is inemuri which means master napper. Many people find this daytime activity quite enjoyable and tend to treat it like a hobby.
Rather than a designated time for rest, inemuri is viewed more like daydreaming. The only difference is that your eyes are shut and you’re actually asleep.
“In Japan, it has always been regarded, at least from the 17th century, to get up and do your work at night, because it’s harder to do it during the day,” Steger explains. “The only way you can show off that you’ve been working hard, aside from your results, of course, is if you are exhausted during the day. But because you have to be modest, you cannot show off all the time. So a way to show it is to just fall asleep when you’re exhausted.”
Inemuri plays an advantageous role in other social situations. For instance, in the case of a board meeting, a boss may pretend to sleep if he feels his presence in the room is too daunting, preventing his younger employees from freely communicating with each other. “It’s quite an interesting and difficult situation to navigate, actually. It requires a lot of cultural competence to know when you can do something and when you can’t.” When on the train, inemuri can work as a convenient way to avoid eye contact with strangers nearby.
Of course, Steger mentions that inemuri can also simply be a way to catch up on lost sleep. She explains that in the instance of a boardroom or classroom, so long as active participation is not required, inemuri is viewed as another way to be present in the situation.
Steger also notes that even among the napping cultures, sleep practices vary drastically. In Somalia, for instance, only men are allowed to nap, whereas in Japan gender no longer plays a role in the activity. The gender barrier in Somalia is due in part to the loss of control over one’s body that comes with falling asleep.
While Western culture may appear to lag behind in the napping realm, the recent media buzz on naps, along with inspiration from Japanese corporate culture, have helped to inspire a new movement that is learning to revel in the afternoon repose.
Nicolas Ronco is the founder and CEO of YeloSpa, a wellness centre in Midtown Manhattan where clients can pay $15 every twenty minutes to nap in cocoon-like cabins. As Ronco explains, one of his inspirations for starting YeloSpa was his observation of Japanese corporate life.
“In Japan, I discovered that the nap was widely accepted in the corporate environment,” says Ronco. “I could see people sleeping at their desks in the middle of the day, even sleeping at meetings. […] People were actually way more patient, drinking much less coffee, doing far fewer drugs.”
Sleep scientist James Maas describes his own rationale when he coined the term “power nap”: “In response to some work that I was doing for IBM — who, at that point in time was very much into ‘power breakfasts’ and ‘power lunches’ — I said, instead of a coffee or coke break, which destroys or at least inhibits REM sleep at night, why not take that ten or twenty minute coffee break that you get in the middle of the afternoon, and take a power nap?
“Since that time, it’s become part of the vernacular, and that term is now used worldwide.”
Despite the attention that napping has received in the West, the stigma persists. Metronaps is an international conglomerate where customers buy time to nap in a futuristic pod. However, YeloSpa still treads with caution.
“I think that in certain cultures — for example, if you work in Wall Street, if you’re a trader or a stock broker — if you tell people that you’re napping, that’s going to be frowned upon,” explains Ronco.
Instead, clients that take naps often buy a traditional spa service. “So if people think that you’re actually going to a ‘real’ session, then they think it’s acceptable. […] No one has to know that they’re adding the naps.
“But the interesting thing is that 80 per cent of our customers are adding twenty-minute naps to whatever treatment they take.
“Napping is becoming more and more accepted,” says Ronco. “What you realize when you open this kind of business is that people are closet nappers. As soon as you tell them you have a nap spa, you have CEOs of major companies and politicians that say, ‘You know what, I actually nap three times a week.’”
It’s reasonable to suppose that the solution to the stigma is to transform the nap into a service rather than a sin. Napping may be the next new trend.
However, it takes more than new packaging to shake off centuries of negative connotations. For the time being, napping will just have to be a guilty pleasure. As Ronco observes, “it’s like the dirty secret that no one talks about, but everyone does.”
