On napping

I’ve been thinking about the topic of napping lately. As I was reading Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, which shows that high-achievers in the past built naps into their daily schedules, and later Why we sleep by Matthew Walker, which also shows the benefits of naps, I wonder why it is not commonly accepted to get some shut-eye during the day.

My father was a brilliant surgeon, with the workload associated which such a career, and still he found the time each day to return home for lunch and then a nap. I always think of him and how he managed to arrange his time in function of what he needed to perform, and what I could learn from that. And since he become ill when I was a teenager, I need to rely on those memories to try to understand better who he was, and by extent, understand myself better.

Here are the links to the two books I mentioned

And here is a poll I recently ran on the topic. Clearly, the majority naps – mostly every now and then, which seems to strengthen my idea that it should be ok to nap at work during the day.