Trial Balloon: July 31, 2009 Archive

The Nap Flap

Posted at 5:00 AM on July 31, 2009 by Dale Connelly (16 Comments)

This week, the Pew Research Center released a survey about napping, and it turns out that on a typical day, about a third of the adults in the United States go down for a mid-day snooze. That's an amazing statistic because everybody seems to be running around so frantically and working so hard (if they have jobs) or looking for work so hard (if they don't), it's tough to imagine so many people finding the time and a suitable place to pass out for a while.

But apparently it's happening all around us. Especially in the workplace.

Some jobs simply can't be interrupted for naptime. Construction crane operator comes to mind. Brain surgeon, certainly. Nuclear plant safety technician, I hope. Others, like college president, tech support and public radio disc jockey are the sort of job that can be done perfectly well by a person who is asleep most of the time.

Following a New York Times article about this study, one commentator endorsed the bathroom as a great place for a nap at work. The bathroom? I suppose the technique would involve barricading one's self in a stall and trying to give the appearance of conducting legitimate business while catching a few winks instead. How could you sit in such a way that you'd be able to sleep? Wouldn't that leave an uncomfortable impression?

I can imagine office cubicle workers who use the phone a lot might discover a certain way to sit with their elbow planted on the desk, their chin balanced on one hand with the other hand curled up by the eyes so that no one need know there are logs being hewn. But what if you have to sit or stand out in the open? How do you take a nap if you're the ticket taker at a movie theater? A mall security guard? Speaker of the House?

Some flaws in the study - they didn't define what a "nap" is - it was left to the respondents to determine if they were napping or not. And there is a stigma attached to napping in our hyper-productive society. Some people are outright nap-need deniers. Others nap and simply don't know they're doing it. Or don't want to know, because jobs hang in the balance. The attorney would like us to believe she was awake all afternoon. After all, she billed those hours to some client, and I'm guessing it wasn't "Physicians for Bedrest".

Plus, the survey didn't include full disclosure data on the detailed napping habits of sleep researchers, so we have to ask - how awake were they while crunching the numbers? Perhaps this is all a dream.

Isn't it time to bring napping out into the open? I nap just about every day, weekends included. How about you? And if you're stealing these Z's at work, how do you do it?

Comment on this post