The best decision is merely to sleep on it
BORIS JOHNSON has been criticised for taking power naps of half an hour or so after lunch occasionally. I have been taking naps – my wife says I can’t call them power naps until I’m powerful enough to deserve it – every afternoon since 1982, and they are not for the lazy.
What they do, as Boris’s hero and mine Winston Churchill discovered, is to increase the amount of work that you can fit into the day.
“Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion,” Churchill wrote, “which, even if it only lasts 20 minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.”
After lunch I climb into my pyjamas, put on an eye-shade, and sleep for 40 minutes, convinced it is a path to health, longevity (Churchill lived to be 90), and increased productivity.
Although I took it up nearly four decades ago because Churchill did it, recently there has been an avalanche of medical research published in learned journals suggesting that it is good for you.
I always point these news items out to my wife, who complains that while I’m sleeping, she’s busily trying to push up Britain’s GDP. (If you do take up napping, don’t expect support and understanding from others.)
Vic Oliver, Churchill’s son-in-law, wrote of him that, “Never to my knowledge, not even during the most serious and hectic alarms and excursions of the war, did he neglect to give himself this brief, restoration sleep: it seems to be a characteristic need for many great men and geniuses.” (Not an argument I try with my wife).
Churchill was 65 years old when he became prime minister in 1940, but naps left him reinvigorated and capable of the enormous physical and mental exertions he was able to undertake until victory was won in 1945. Both Thomas Edison and Mark Twain used to sleep in batches, napping wherever and wherever they could. Margaret Thatcher used to take a nap in the afternoon in an armchair in her study at No10 from 2.45pm to 3pm, just prior to Prime Minister’s Questions.
Naps are best taken between about 2.30pm and 5.30pm, when one’s biorhythms
are at their lowest: coffee is of course the arch-enemy of this regime, and reasonable amounts of red wine at lunchtime a distinct ally.
One study has suggested that beds should be installed in the British workplace, because our best ideas come to us under the duvet rather than in the office, where only 11 per cent of our brightest ideas germinate.