To Nap Perchance to Innovate
I’m a New Yorker, and I’m sleep deprived.
Most residents of the city that never sleeps would utter these words in a tone of defiance and bravado, a badge of honor. Some long-time dwellers of the insomniac metropolis, however, may mutter such words with a resigned and what-else-is-new shrug.
Replace “New Yorker” in the phrase and the same cultural bias holds for most societal and family positions. A mother, business owner, military commander, or president of the United States, the theory holds, should be sleep-deprived or else they lack the mettle, drive, and tenacity required for greatness. Wasn’t the captain of the Titanic in his cabin dozing when the ship struck the iceberg?
Although the human body quickly begins to break down without sleep in a more dramatic and all-consuming fashion than from lack of water or food, the stereotype of the sleeper as someone unsuited for the highest human callings is hardwired into the cultural discourse.
We elect leaders whom we believe are better suited to answer the red phone at 3 am and not 3 pm. We admonish those lacking in motivation not to sleepwalk through their lives. Our inspirational poems warn is that although the wise man may be tempted by the “lovely, dark, and deep” allure of a good shuteye, he is soon enlightened that “he has miles to go before he sleeps.” Even the Almighty, Psalm 21 announces, proves his almightiness by ensuring his worshippers that he “will not slumber.” At times, the linguistic associations of death to sleep are sledgehammered home, such as the beloved pet “put to sleep.”
The funny thing is that few stereotypes are so lacking in factual basis. Except for the commonly supine position and closed eyes of both the sleeper and the deceased, sleep is nothing like death. While the human body quickly begins a process of decay and disintegration at the moment of death, in sleep it does exactly the opposite. It undergoes a mysterious process of regeneration that is akin to a little resurrection. No other human activity heals and restores body and mind, so naturally, so pervasively, so consistently, and so self-sufficiently.
But how did such a good thing get such a bad rep in our wider culture? Sleep is associated with laziness, such as controversial the siesta-ing Mexican icon, the guilty lose it, the inept do it at the wheel), those with unleashed potential are giants, the licentious do it around, and if you are targeted by a hitman eventually you will do it with the fishes.
In real-world practice, however, sufficient sleep actually empowers us to be more productive and effective at any task. The economic costs of sleep deprivation have been estimated to be upward of 411 billion dollars a year in the United States. Insufficient sleep is by no means proof of an almighty nature, as the psalmist claims. In fact sleep deprivation wreaks such havoc on our emotional and psychological makeup that human rights groups consider it torture when used on prisoners.
The resistance to accepting such incontestable evidence and acting on it may arise from the unwillingness of our walking selves to cede any more ground to our sleeping selves. To reap the heap of benefits listed above, we must invest a third of every day to sleep, which most of us feel is too dear a price to pay. So we cheat; we borrow chunks of the investment for our waking selves, thinking we are cheating death and hoarding precious minutes, when we are in fact undermining the quality of our waking hours.
The daytime nap faces a more formidable PR nightmare. Perforce, social protocol and norms have been organized almost entirely around the third of the day we give up. To make sure the sleeping selves rob us of no more, we vilify, bluntly weaving death-sleep associations into our understansing of the world. For example, we say that those whose professional lives unfold during the sleep period that they work “the graveyard shift,” even if they are doctors and are in fact tasked with keeping people from graveyards. We imagine the sleep world ruled by malevolent entities such as witches, who have their own hour, and other monstrous creatures such as those portrayed in Goya’s etching “The Sleep of Reason.”
The nap dares something even more audacious than the night sleep period, it moves to claim territory in the land of the wakeful. Although it too comes with a scientific imprimatur—nappers awake refreshed, their mental acuity sharpened, their mood lightened, and stress ameliorated—naps are often vilified as wasteful and often partnered with our basest, prejudiced instincts, such as with the image of the sleeping Mexican.
The idea of providing workers comfortable spaces to nap would have been ridiculed out of the conference room a generation ago, but the data reams on the advantages gained from even very short naps, makes such mockery now seem irresponsible and close-minded.
Humans are in a minority of mammals considered “monosaphic” sleepers with two distinct periods of wakeful and sleep periods. Most other mammals are “polyphasic,” napping in short unmarked periods throughout the day, most famously the insouciant house cat. The condition in humans, however, may not be natural but culturally enforced as way of keeping the mystery of sleep contained within its boundaries. If humans were “polysaphic,” civilization we are convinced would collapse.
Yet, all humans were at one-point “polysaphic” sleepers, naturally talented at improvised sleep periods according to the body’s needs. The best sleeper is one who “sleeps like a baby.” Many prominent businesses have finally become enlightened on what the mothers of such babies know. The baby who awakes from the improvised nap is happier, more alert, more engaged, more curious, and more focused than the inconsolable, fidgety creature before the nap. The recently awakened baby is an up-graded model, both more alive than the pre-nap baby and much more empowered to develop and grow.
By providing designed quiet spaces or company-wide sleep pods, organizations known for establishing outposts of innovation that in time reshape the culture, such as Nike, Google, and NASA, are counting on replicating the mother’s experience with the pre-nap and post-nap baby. A simple change, such as investing in employee recovery of paying workers while they nap may soon transform corporate culture by formalizing a practice through which returns for time investment will prove exponential, and those who resisted such risk-free methods to upgrade workforces will one day be seen as backward and short sighted.
This innovation seems so simple and obvious that it might give the impression that it is a fantasy. But it has been proven to work by most institutions that have had the courage to employ it, from high schools that replace detentions with napping sessions, to research centers analyzing the benefits of napping to address attention deficit disorders, to college campuses that promote rest centers as part of their benefits.
Personally, I have found that the simple prospect of getting a mid-afternoon nap even boosts my pre-nap energy. I don't go into that "energy saving" mode that is common in the early afternoon for most of us. I push hard during the first leg of my workday knowing that midday nap will help me reset the clock. After my "espresso and nap" formula, I feel full of energy through the four or five hours of work left in the day. This residual benefit of the napping strategy accentuates the benefits throughout the day and can only be studied further the more widespread the practice is executed.
Innovation is the catchword of the new century, but the thinking on this idea has to be expanded beyond technology to best practices for companies and organizations. Such innovation seeks to improve the output of the workforce by sharpening skills not only on a direct level but also through sustainable changes that enhance energy throughout the day. We all know how beneficial such a habit is on a personal level, from the time we were toddlers to the moment we wake up from a refreshing nap ready to tackle any challenges. To not try to employ this on wider societal, cultural, and business level is to cheat our world of a more prosperous future.