Maybe it's just me, but for me, having plenty of non-working time to do things like sleep makes me more productive. I mean, maybe I'm weird, but things like working reasonable hours and having ample time off tend to make me a happier, healthier person.
But I guess lying down at work in my clothes is... another way of doing it.
There's a substantial difference between sleeping at work because you work 17-hour days, and taking a quick nap in the middle of an otherwise normal work day as a simple way to 'reset' between morning and afternoon.
That's not what they're talking about in the article, though:
> [About China:] Workers caught in the throes of a 12-hour (or more) work cycle are encouraged to take a daily midday rest, which typically lasts no more than 30 minutes
> ...
> Workers who fall asleep on the job or are tired to the point of incompetence are losing significant amounts of money for their employers and the broader economy
I.e. naps help you drive your workers even harder.
Near term, at least. Unionizing might reach more dramatic results, but that's a many decades endeavor, and doesn't help people today. Short term relief has value.
I'm not sure why those are mutually exclusive. I typically work a standard 9-6 schedule, and I'm always a little dozy after lunch; a 20-minute nap in my chair saves a couple hours of blearily forgetting what I was doing.
Anecdotally a 20-minute midday nap resets my state of my mind. Though it's not practical in the office, living close to work can make it possible.
I find a 10- to 14-hour day much more palatable with a break in the middle. I wonder if Jack Dorsey does something like that between Square/Twitter time.
Try limiting your nap to 20 mins max. Anything longer and it's likely you'll enter REM sleep, and waking from REM sleep may be what contributes to this feeling.
Now that I work from home on a remote gig, I find myself using my lunch break time as a nap time pretty often.
It works out pretty well. I log in around 10am, deal with meetings and admin stuff for a while, do some testing on the code I wrote the day before, brainstorm new features or whatever thought-type stuff needs to happen that can be interrupted after the business meetings that drive that.
Then I take lunch around 2. Nap for an hour, and then go on Do-not-disturb mode from 3-7 when I get a large chunk of uninterrupted time to code.
I usually cook food for the week on Sunday afternoons with my gf, so I don't really need to go find food. I sort of graze slowly while doing the coding work, and I try to keep it healthy.
Though sometimes we get busy, and I don't cook. But then I can order something for delivery or just eat some of my emergency stash of staple foods.
But I digress. My point is that getting to rest for an hour on most days is really good for my mindset. It separates the morning from the afternoon and really prepares me to get in the mood for writing code.
I think I'm really productive this way. Far more so than sitting in an office setting where I'm constantly tired and distracted.
Should note that I have a separate room in the apt. that's dedicated office space. I only go in there for work. I think that mentally, that makes a big difference about being able to shrug off work for an hour at a time and just mentally relax. I'm not even sure that I fall asleep on my lunch break. But it's a huge mental boon for me.
Just a side note as a fellow napper, 30 minutes is not generally recommended, but rather 15-20min, 45min or 1.5h if you need more. Timing naps is key, napping 30min will generally make you groggy because it's out of sync with the sleep patterns.
Maybe I'm the weird one, but my biology seems to be not to nap. A few years ago I tried for a while to take a nap during my lunch break, but I just couldn't fall asleep even after 30 minutes simply because I don't even get a little bit tired during my work hours (I usually sleep well and enough at night). If I'm actually tired because I haven't slept enough at night and I manage to take a short nap, I feel even worse after it.
I'm still not convinced that taking a nap is actually the natural thing to do.
It's entirely reasonable that you've tried napping and found it doesn't work for you, but assuming everyone is the same and therefore napping won't work for anyone is somewhat irrational. Lots of things affect people in many different ways. Napping clearly works for some.
As for suggesting taking a nap isn't "the natural thing to do", what does that actually mean? Nothing modern humans do can be considered "natural" because we've radically changed our environment to the point that it's unrecognisable from anything in nature. There's no such thing as "natural" in an age of electric lighting, computers, processed food, mechanised transport, etc.
I visit our Chinese chip design customers such as Huawei, Fiberhome quite a bit. The napping starts after their lunchtime, and it is more than 30 minutes. They start to break for lunch around 1130am. Since food is provided at a canteen, lunch is a fairly quick affair. Around 1230pm, lights are off. Some people have a foldable bed, like a camping bed, tucked under their desks, others nap on their seats. There are no dedicated rooms for napping. People simply nap in front of their desks. Others prefer to surf net, go for a walk or even continue to work. You don't have to nap "Nap time" usually range between 1 to 1.5 hours. Often, vendors like us excuse ourselves so that we don't disturb them. Even phones are off. I would say only large companies have this culture. I don't think the smaller companies do that. Again my data points limited to chip design companies.
Who are these people who can nap at work? I mean, how can they physically do it?
I hear people complain about not being able to get a good night's sleep in their bed at home. The phone doesn't ring any less during the workday. And who has an office these days quiet enough for sleep? (As if anyone other than founders gets an actual office. Shhhh... Type quietly. It's the boss's nap time.)
I was in SF a couple weeks ago and had trouble sleeping even in the hotel. Does anyone in SF not drive a firetruck? You'd think the whole city burnt down every night. The concept of tech workers napping mid-workday reminds me of those scenes in My Cousin Vinni.
It's not uncommon for an enlightened place to have a nap room with a couch. If I'm already dozing off at my desk, it would be no problem to get a bit of shuteye in a dark room.
Some people are unable to nap at all and don't sleep well. Sucks to be them.
There's something precious about the currency of sleep in the work place. It's non existent. You've never felt like you're dozing off for a minute and would kill to be in bed at that moment?
My kids keep me up often enough during the night that I can quite easily doze off during a long meeting or after a big lunch for about 20 minutes. It makes a huge positive difference in my day.
I noticed this in Shenzhen last year. At some point around lunchtime the lights in the office would go off and everyone would have a nap in their chair.
But then this is because they are in the office 12+ hours a day and seemed to have only one day per week off. Routinely.
I'm good for about 5 hours of high concentration most days. Throw a nap in the middle, I'm good for 9 or 10, which was normal when I was freelancing and set my own hours.
Napping is necessary if you do high stressful work and you want not to burn out.
The nervous system is composed of parasympathetic and sympathetic systems and only one could work at any given time.
When people work too much, they use the sympathetic system almost exclusively and the body wears as it is not repaired as it should.
If you try to do too much, but your digestive system stops working at it should, your immune system stops working at it should, your sexual system stops working at it should, you are in a big problem in medium and long term.
In fact, people use artificial stimulants like coffee in order to mess and fool the natural mechanism of body repair. But they are fooling themselves because if you eliminate the signals but not the problem, you make the problem worse.
Science has studied elite sports in order to get better athletes and know we know that for every effort, you need a given resting time. Give no rest and the person can't compete in the elite, period.
Great comment. Just to add, if you carry the stress of work around with you outside of the workplace, it'll also hamper your parasympathetic and sympathetic balance. Of course, this also applies if you are carrying around too much personal stress as well.
Next time you get into a conversation about work-life balance and say you don't have time for a workout, think again about that.
It always amuses me to see how science has taken hold in every part of life. Maybe not science per se, but the idea of action/reaction, of doing something to gain something. You know, not for the pleasure of it, not because we feel good or it's the right thing to do, but because "it says so in the paper", "it boosts productivity" or "lowers the risk of diabetes by 5%, studies have shown". That's just fascinating.
It maybe true that there is something of a cargo-cult around science, but it is still far from religion. We accept that a scientific fact may change, as better evidence comes in; and that these are discovered facts without exclusive ownership.
My father, an industrial scientist, took a lunchtime nap every day throughout his career. He was quite brazen about it... even took his nap outdoors during the summer months.
I really benefit from a little nap at lunch time. I start my nap with a book or my tablet computer on my lap, to make it look like I fell asleep by accident.
I personally think that napping is kind of a skill that has to be learned and practiced. Even babies have to be taught how to nap on demand.
This just sounds like another excuse for Americans to have 12-hour workdays. What they need is a regulated 7.5h workday like the rest of the civilised world.
I won't argue too hard about that, but just as a counter example, I'm American and I work a fairly ordinary nine hour day, which includes a hour for lunch and breaks. I try to get a good night's sleep, but I'm old enough that that isn't as easy as it once was. I'm finding afternoon naps to be more and more desirable, not because I'm overworking but because of other life circumstances.
Nap can be really good for productivity for most people. I wish I could nap. Here's a great (and very long) article about the relationship between sleeping and learning http://super-memory.com/articles/sleep.htm
I'm lucky that I have an office to myself. I nap almost every day after my mid-day snack (I eat three times at work, small amounts). I usually drink a cup of green or black tea right before. I nap sitting up in a chair and I run a timer. I don't alarm the timer, I just want to know how long I have napped. Usually it is 8 mins to 23 mins and typically about 12 seems to be the median.
My ability to nap goes a long way back. Between undergraduate and graduate school I worked rotating shifts in a textile mill and had a job where I fed cloth into a large continuous washing machine. I needed to tend to the machine every 5 to 10 mins. I used to nap standing up for 1 to 2 minutes. Maybe it was more like meditation. But whatever it was it helped me through the night. This was in the mid 1970s.
In the early 80’s I used to fly 48 to 50 weeks a year. With delayed flights and customers that wanted to extract a full week of consulting for me I flew oten early morning and late evening. I trained myself to sleep while the jet was taking off. Even with the noise of the engine I was able to nap. Now, when we travel for fun I have a hard time not sleeping for the first 15 minutes of the flight. This really surprises my family.
Around 2010 I had a meditation coach that gave me a post hypnotic suggestion (self hypnosis and meditation are really close to the same thing, at least for me) to go into a trance when I put my hands in a certain position. So now when I nap I do that with my hands and 9 times out of 10 my brain quiets down and within a minute I am out. Sometimes I don’t nap and I just quiet the brain (mindfulness meditation) but either way I feel better and am more productive.
My afternoon productivity is so much better. I can awaken. turn around, turn the lights on and start coding (Java, Python) within a few minutes. My productivity is so much better after a nap.
I’m 62 and want to work another 5 years or so. I see the ability to nap critical to me staying competitive in my workplace. I’m lucky I can nap sitting up and have my own office. Barring unforeseen issues I will work at the same place for the next 5 years.
I do manage my sleep cycle tightly because my wife and I are at the gym at 5:20 AM everyday of the week. So I am usually in bed at 9 to 9:30. Of course this makes partying harder on the weekend but I’m not much on that anymore. The exercise is so important and I was so late to that game. My prediabetes is gone (diet also helps) and I am more mobile and just feel better.
If you have trouble napping maybe you can find someone to coach you through meditation. Local universities that have non-credit courses sometimes have meditation classes. that is how I got my meditation coach.
A 20 minute early afternoon nap does wonders for my productivity and alertness for the rest of the day. Sadly, I don't work in a place where that is easy to do explicitly. But there is that little-used lab over in the other building...
I missed the time when I can take a nap after lunch. We don't really do that here in US, but it is particularly for me to keep up with work after the first 1-2 hours after lunch.
I sometimes nap in the middle of the workday because I feel sleepy. Not because I think it will make me more productive. Everything doesn't always have to be justified on the basis of productivity, you know.
>Everything doesn't always have to be justified on the basis of productivity, you know.
That really depends on who is paying for your time. If I own a company and you want to nap on company time, then you definitely need to justify it on the basis of productivity.
But I guess lying down at work in my clothes is... another way of doing it.