Taking Naps
Sleep: Who gets it? Between all the poking, the nudging and the caffeinated malt liquor, logging the recommended seven to eight hours per night rests comfortably in the category of impossible. If you're like me, you average around six, thereby tripling your risk of a car accident, a grizzly statistic owing to compromised reaction time, judgment, vision, information processing, short-term memory, performance, motivation, vigilance and patience.
What you could do is take a nap. Add three 20-minute stints — one mid-morning, one around lunchtime, another mid-afternoon, say — to last night's six-hour sleep and you're already at the low end of the desired range. Not only are you less apt to crumple your co-worker's side door, you're generally more pleasant to be around. Before you know it your friend count has multiplied and you're winning awards left and right. Could it have something to do with your radiant complexion, gazillion-watt smile and svelte new figure? Probably.
Practically the whole world's doing it. In China, India, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Malta, the Middle East and North Africa, afternoon sleep is coveted and often encouraged. In Japan, daytime napping, or inemuri, is relatively commonplace among corporate workers and the student population, and in Spain and many Latin American countries, there's the traditional daily sleep known as siesta, generally observed following a robust midday meal. Around the world, followers of Islam bed down in accordance with Sunnah, Mohammed himself having been an avid nap-taker.
But before you go nodding off in a puddle of your own drool, pay heed: There are rules. For one, watch the time. When you sleep through the night, you pass through different stages of sleep, known together as a sleep cycle. There's drowsiness, light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep. Experts advise that you call your nap at between 15 and 30 minutes, or before you enter the deep, "slow wave" segment. Past this point awakening can be tough, thanks to a phenomenon known as sleep inertia, which will not certainly but probably make you groggy. And cranky, which is a real bum deal. Fall into this trap and you'll lose all those new friends of yours, maybe even an award or two. So have a co-worker agree to wake you, program the alarm in your phone — whatever it takes.
There are also different ways to nap. You can power-nap, whereby you doze for 15-20 minutes with the intention to revive yourself during the workaday. If the context is more leisurely, maybe it's Sunday afternoon and you've nothing better to do, you might indulge in a catnap. The relatively unsung "caffeine nap" is as it sounds: a power nap preceded by a dose of caffeine, be it coffee, an energy drink or a NoDoz. The key here is to drift off immediately post-caffeine, before the energy source begins to work its magic. Once it does, approximately 15 minutes after intake — bam — you're manic with fake energy plus that from the nap. Finally, there's the innovative, 100 percent nap-reliant strategy known as Polyphasic Sleep, which dictates that rather than slumber straight through the night, you chunk your sleep into short naps of 20-40 minutes throughout the day. (Whoa.)
But while a languorous Sunday snooze is easily situated, finding a place to saw logs at 2:30 on a Tuesday can require creativity. At least for a car-less office grunt like me.
Take the other day: My usual bedroom, an oddly comforting and rarely used conference room, was occupied by various men wearing suits and wagging Treos. Slighted, I sighed loudly to the awareness of no one and stormed off in pursuit of a backup. I actually already had a handful of established Plan Bs, though I take issue with them all. There's the toilet, centrepiece of a little scheme shared with me by a chronically exhausted co-worker. "I just sit down, lean my head against the wall and sleep." Good for her, but for me rest is hard-won in this setting. (Pants up or down? Too weird.)
Then there's under my desk. The last time I pulled this, things got off to a great start — lots of space, a nice box and a few sheets of bubble wrap, darkness — but then hit a snag in the form of my CFO's ill-timed trip past my desk en route to the bathroom, coinciding as it did with my enthusiastic, jack-in-the-box emergence. (Pop!) Two months later, his eyebrows still knit together when he sees me.
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My track record in the copy room is rosier. A few weeks ago, upon discovering a two-foot gap between a couple of file cabinets, I decided I'd give it a go. Lying prone in this space, just long enough to accommodate my 5'6" person, I'm awarded a good deal of privacy. In fact, you'd really have to crane your neck to spot me, and since nobody ever gets excited about the musty old files kept there, I consider this the safest of the backups. Even so, reclining for a doze turns it into a real event, a commitment, which makes me feel vulnerable. And possibly a little too secure; I once lost a whole hour to the copy room, nudged out of a dream by the crunching sounds of a staple remover. No matter that it was a very pleasant, work-inappropriate dream; the risk is just too great.
But on this particular Thursday, my luck turned. I was on my way to the copy room when I spied more rows of file cabinets, these ones lining the wall of an empty cubicle. It wasn't the cabinets I was interested in, though. It was the square-ish space created where two rows forming a broken right angle almost met — just visible from my vantage point. Then I saw the stack of promo posters propped against the wall, and I knew I'd struck gold.
My eyelids were heavy; I drooped in anticipation of the un-self conscious round of z's that surely awaited me. Seconds later I was in position: sitting with knees up and head against the wall, boxed in by a Batman Returns poster. And I slept — soundly and for a perfect 20 minutes.
So it can be done. Whether you hole up in an empty office, drape yourself over a toilet or crouch behind a ficus, the midday, workweek nap is yours for the taking.
Sweet dreams.
Name withheld by request.
