Jeremiah Keenan | ?Nap more, sleep less

Keen on the Truth | When 4 p.m. rolls around tomorrow, give up and go to bed

By Jeremiah Keenan 09/16/14 10:36pm

M ode rn studies have a delightful way of discovering the obvious. For example, modern psychologists have found that if you physically act in a certain way — against your natural impulses — your natural impulses will gradually align with your actions.

Aristotle pointed this out 2300 years ago.

Perhaps a more amusing discovery of modern science is that human beings are designed to sleep at night and take a nap in the early afternoon. I grew up in China, where over a billion people have been naively following this schedule without consulting modern science, but in America we do not do things this way.

We surf the internet after lunch with half-closed eyes and coffee in hand, trying to figure out if it makes sense to take a nap. But by the time our brains have sluggishly come to a conclusion, the coffee has kicked in and we table the idea.

Fortunately for us, modern science has recently caught up with antiquity on the subject of napping. In a 2002 Harvard study , humans were set to the extremely practical task of reporting the orientation of diagonal bars in the lower left-hand corner of a computer screen. Subjects did better if they took a nap after the second of four daily practice sessions. A host of other studies are crowded around this one, all attesting to the fact that naps increase alertness and quality of work.

Unfortunately, sleep — especially during the day — is still unpopular in America. This has created a “counter-cultural movement” in support of slumber. The icon of this movement, Arianna Huffington — like St. Paul — was converted under extreme circumstances. She fainted from exhaustion while hard at work one day, and broke her cheekbone on her desk. When she raised her head from this unexpected nap, apparently she saw the light. And her powerful voice has been raised in support of sleep ever since.

But for some reason most Penn students don’t take a regular nap. Why? Because much as we’d all love to nap, we just don’t have the time. Of course, we’d feel better if we slept more. We’d also feel better if we spent four hours a day in the gym! But you just can’t do that if you’re taking six credits and working weekends in a lab. Napping isn’t an Ivy League thing.

I held a similarly cynical view of napping early on in high school. As pressures mounted in my junior year, however, I started looking into ways to maintain alertness while reducing the total amount of time I spent sleeping. The result was that I discovered the daily nap. I found a study claiming that 20 minutes of sleep eight hours after waking boosts stamina more than sleeping an extra 20 minutes in the morning. I tried the idea out and quickly became a dedicated napper. I found it possible to reduce my total sleeping time and maintain the high level of productivity I associated with an eight and a half to nine hour night. The afternoon “drag” was also removed from my life, buying even more productive time.

So, here’s my pitch for napping. Tomorrow afternoon, if you can’t concentrate on your work, set your watch alarm for 20 minutes and lay down in a quiet place for a nap (make sure you don’t nap for over 30 minutes as this may cause you to wake up feeling groggy). You may well find that those 20 minutes buy you back an hour of sleep you couldn’t get the night before.

Jeremiah Keenan is a College sophomore from China. His email address is jkeenan@sas.upenn.edu. “Keen on the Truth” appears every Wednesday.

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