Napping at work could recharge sleep-deprived nation
President Donald Trump prides himself on getting by with just four or five hours of sleep at night, which leaves him plenty of time early in the morning to scan cable TV news and tweet before going to work.
During last year’s rough-and-tumble campaign, he scoffed at “low-energy” rivals Republican Jeb Bush and Democrat Hillary Clinton for carving out nap time. “No naps for Trump! I don’t nap,” the 71-year-old Trump bellowed during one campaign stop. “We don’t have time.”
Yet history is replete with powerful leaders and warriors such as Napoleon, Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy who routinely napped in the afternoon, regardless of the crises swirling around them. “Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without the refreshment of blessed oblivion, which even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces,” Churchill once wrote.
And increasingly, science is siding with the nappers, with researchers finding that short sleeps not only are beneficial to drowsy individuals and the elderly but also are essential to public health, public safety and economic productivity.
“Now, I don’t know Donald Trump nor have I done sleep studies on him,” said Philip M. Alapat, an assistant professor specializing in pulmonary disease and sleep disorders at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “But the number of people that can truly function optimally with four or five hours of sleep on a nightly basis are few.”
An international team of neurologists recently published a study showing how sleep deprivation can disrupt brain cells’ ability to interact and communicate. A night of lost sleep can result in temporary mental lapses that impair memory and distort visual perceptions, according to the study published in November in the journal Nature Medicine.
Itzhak Fried, the senior author of the study and a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Tel Aviv University, said in a statement that his team discovered that “starving the body of sleep also robs neurons of the ability to function properly.”
In a recent study, University of Pennsylvania researchers found that a moderate nap in the afternoon coincided with improvements in people’s thinking and memory prowess and may have helped the brain perform as if it were five years younger.
The latest research dovetails with longtime warnings about the dangers of insufficient sleep, which the National Institutes of Health says can lead to “physical and mental health problems, injuries, loss of productivity, and even a greater risk of death.”
Over the years, sleeplessness has quietly grown into a pervasive problem. One-third of American adults regularly get too little sleep, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly half of all American adults complain that poor or insufficient sleep affects their daily activities at least once a week, according to the National Sleep Foundation.
Without at least seven or eight hours of sleep at night, Americans face a tough slog getting through the day and leave themselves more vulnerable to illness. Scientists have linked sleep deficiency to many chronic health problems, including heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, obesity and depression.
The desperate need for brief R-and-R in the middle of the day has given rise to a workday sleep industry, in which office workers downtown or travelers at airports can buy some quiet time for “power naps.”
Recharj, a meditation and napping salon that opened a year ago in Washington, D.C., has had more than 7,000 visitors. About half of them have availed themselves of a 25-minute power nap in cocoons complete with head pillows, eye shades, blankets and optional earplugs. “We’re seeing between 20 to 30 people each day, with peak time for power naps around lunchtime,” says Daniel Turissini, the company’s founder.
Meanwhile, some of the nation’s most innovative companies — including Google, Ben & Jerry’s, Uber, PwC and HuffPost — have installed napping spaces for their workers.