In Praise of Naps
I enjoy a good nap. In fact, I basically live life perpetually on the brink of nap. (Until the sun goes down, that is, when I become weirdly awake.) And I’ve always thought napping, or sleeping in general, to be one of the most sensible ways of spending one’s time.
It was something of a revelation to me when I read, many years ago, that from the prospective of evolutionary biology, the important question about sleep is not why we do it, but why we do so little of it. What needs explaining is why we spend so much of our time awake, when we could be sleeping. (The answer, in a nutshell: sex.)
Health economist and nap aficionado Austin Frakt brings the science on napping. A recent paper (digested here) addresses the question of whether napping with your head on your desk is as restorative as lying-down napping. The verdict: no, but it’s better than not napping at all.
To my mind, the observation that any napping is better than no napping counts as a priori true. The fact that empirical research now confirms it can only be greeted with…a yawn.
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