March 18, 2007
Power Nap in Taiwan
In Taiwan, it's perfectly acceptable to sleep with one's coworkers-"sleep" being the operative word.
Brief catnaps after lunch are commonplace in many Taiwanese companies. Typically, all workers take lunch around the same time, from noon to 1:30. After eating, those employees who wish to can flick off their desk lamps, pull out a pillow, and take a snooze lasting perhaps 15 to 30 minutes. Even those workers who aren't napping will usually dim their lights and speak softly until the break is over.
"In Chinese medicine, a rest at noon is considered good for your health," says Violet Cheong, a Taiwanese editor. "It's generally believed that a nap will help workers with alertness and productivity in the afternoon."
There's new research to support this belief. Studies show that the human body is programmed to take a dip in energy at midday, whether food is eaten or not. "Even a nap as short as five minutes can increase alertness and memory skills," says Sara Mednick, a sleep expert at the University of California-San Diego's Laboratory of Sleep and Behavioral Neuroscience. A 15-minute power nap can boost concentration, dexterity, mood, and overall health.
Safety. Drooping eyelids on the job do more than hurt productivity. They can also prove fatal. In her book, Take a Nap! Change Your Life, Mednick notes that sleep deprivation causes countless minor accidents and contributed to some major workplace disasters-including the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Union Carbide chemical explosion in India, and the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl. The United States is a "nation of the walking tired," she writes, "so much so that 51 percent of the workforce reports that sleepiness on the job interferes with the volume of work they can do."
That exhaustion can be a costly problem. According to a January 2007 article in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, "workers with fatigue cost employers $136.4 billion annually in health-related LPT [lost productive time]."
So are U.S. employers embracing the benefits of naps? Keep dreaming.
"There is definitely a stigma against napping," says Andrew Moore-Ede with Circadian Technologies Inc., an international consulting firm specializing in work hours and productivity. In its recent survey of U.S. companies that run beyond 9 to 5 (mostly 24-7), fully 75 percent do not allow napping, and many punish workers caught sleeping on the job.
But tired workers can lapse into "microsleeps" of just a few seconds, says Moore-Ede, which can lead to truck crashes or assembly-line mishaps. "It's better to manage napping than to ban it," he says.
A few American companies are beginning to see the light. Yarde Metals in Connecticut has a "Z-Lounge" with a zero-gravity chair that rotates and surrounds the napper with soothing smells, sounds, and images like babbling brooks and crackling fires.
But nap space needn't be so elaborate. Companies should take the hint from Taiwan: Buy employees pillows instead of an espresso machine, and watch the bottom line soar.
This story appears in the March 26, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
Labels: nap, power nap, powernap
Power Nap Good for Recharge
However, despite the popularity and convenience of the variety of coffees, sodas and energy drinks, it seems that a short nap is the most effective and healthy way for sleep deprived students to recharge.
Jim Almeda, health educator and faculty sponsor of Peer Educators, said that while naps do have the potential to throw off your sleep cycle, most research supports the notion that naps can be beneficial.
"We suggest to college students that they try and go to bed at about the same time every night and try to get in about eight hours of sleep. However, the college lifestyle may not always allow for this, so taking a nap during the day may help some students feel more rested overall," Almeda said.
Almeda said the key to an effective nap is to keep it relatively short and not take it too late in the day. The length of a typical "power nap" should be between 15 to 20 minutes, which is just enough time to get some real rest and not fall into a deeper sleep cycle. He also said a good target time to take a nap would be between noon and two in the afternoon.
There are also a number of professional offices that are realizing the possible benefits of napping and are allowing time for their employees to sleep during the workday.
Some even provide napping areas with comfortable chairs and couches.
However, most professionals agree that a good night's rest is the best way to stay energized.
Dr. David West, medical director of the Sleep Center of Central Illinois, said he feels that the best way to maintain a healthy sleep cycle is to get enough sleep in the first place.
"In general, everyone should get an appropriate amount of sleep each night," West said.
West suggests that college students should get approximately eight to 10 hours of sleep each night and should also try and get themselves on a regular sleeping routine.
"There are no quick fixes when it comes to not getting enough sleep," West said.
However, West also mentioned that if a student is truly sleep deprived, taking a short nap is a reasonable method to rest.
Labels: nap, power nap, powernap
Power Naps Big in Vietnam
Just seeing a new customer at the door, the employee of a ‘sleep service’ shop on Pham Ngoc Thach Road, District 3, HCM City, welcomed him and took him to a big room with an air conditioner, where over ten people were staying already. Most of them are office staff.
The room has several sofas with pillows. Music came from a corner, mixing with low voices. A moment later, some customers began to snore. Sleep came quickly.
In another room, nearly 20 people were sitting against the wall, their legs stretched on the timber floor. This is the room for those who want to have a sitting sleep.
“Those customers are mainly state employees who have only around 30 minutes for a nap,” an employee of the ‘sleeping shop’ explained.
At noon, at a small café on the corner of Le Thanh Ton - Nam Ky Khoi Nghia, District 1, two young girls who look like employees of foreign offices entered, called for two strawberry juices and quickly lied down on a bed.
On an adjacent sofa, a group of four foreign girls were also getting a wink of sleep.
Hong Phuong, an accountant, a regular customer of this café, said: “We often come here for lunch and take a nap after lunch as well. The price for food is quite high but we have a nap to regain strength for the afternoon."
A stock broker said that his colleagues and foreign businessmen often go to an apartment on Le Loi Street to take a siesta. The price for one hour there is VND20,000 and to sleep there customers must book in advance.
Sleep business
Truong Binh Trong, a stock investor, introduced us to an address for naps that businessmen often go to. That’s a house at the corner of Vo Van Tan - Nguyen Thuong Hien roads.
The house looks like a normal office from outside but when customers enter the house they will be immediately welcomed by two charming girls.
“You have come for a nap?” they asked, and led a customer to a room with eight sofas. Five sofas were occupied already. Next to each sofa was a girl who was massaging the face or washing the hair of a sleeping customer.
Thanh Hoa, an employee at this place, explained: “Our job is serving customers in a friendly manner. All customers are well-behaved men who come here to take a nap. If something happened between us and customers, we would be fired."
This shop not only serves men but also women, who are office employees or businesswomen. The price for a sleep at this high-end shop is VND70,000 - 80,000 (US$4.3 - 5), plus fees for massage and hair washing.
Labels: nap, power nap, powernap
Power Nap is Good
Five years ago I participated in a study, led by research scientist Sara Mednick, to test whether taking a nap would affect the speed and accuracy with which subjects detected changes in a computer-generated image. The study found that those who stayed awake performed worse over the course of the day, while those (myself included) who took a 30-minute snooze in the middle of the day maintained their speed and accuracy. And those who slept for an hour became faster and more accurate as the day wore on. For me, the benefits of napping aren’t hypothetical; they’re experimentally tested.
Armed with this evidence, you would think I would take more naps. But I don’t. I can’t shake the sense that napping is slothful and decadent, for the lazy and weak. In a society that places a premium on the appearance of productivity – even at the cost of actual productivity – just the impression of wasted time is enough to damn the practice. But it is well established that humans experience a lull around midafternoon, when the homeostatic pressure to sleep briefly overwhelms the circadian signal to remain awake.
Napping has been common practice for most of history, in many cultures – not just in Spain and Latin America, where businesses famously shut down in the hours after lunch. According to Mednick’s new book, Take a Nap! Change Your Life, ancient Roman, Christian, Jewish and Arabic mythologies featured demons roaming the Earth during midday, terrorising those who weren’t safely tucked in bed. One such demon, Poludnica, wandered over the (notably chilly) Slavic regions, carrying shears to signify death.
But the American-style 9-to-5 workday and anti-nap ethos are becoming the norm. More and more businesses in China, where the workday typically began at 8am and ended at 6pm, with a break after lunch for a snooze, are implementing the 9-to-5 schedule. The Spanish government eliminated the siesta for civil servants in 2005 and has launched a campaign to reform the workday and end the siesta for all. The siesta is “not rational, it’s not efficient and it does not pay in terms of family life,” Pasqual Maragall, former president of Catalonia, said last year. In Mexico, former President Ernesto Zedillo ended the nap for government workers in 1999.
This move away from traditional napping is mostly because of the need for standardised business hours in a global economy, the increasing availability of air-conditioning in hot climates and the difficulty of sneaking home for a catnap in a commuter culture. But it also can be traced to the particularly American brand of Puritanism the United States has exported, along with Coca-Cola and Levi’s, that celebrates the appearance of self-denial. Naps are good, but they look bad – and so they are, at best, a guilty pleasure. (The only country bucking this trend is France, where there’s nothing guilty about pleasure and where the health minister recently announced that the government would study the effects of afternoon naps.)
Labels: nap, power nap, powernap
NHL players Power Nap too
