In Defence of the Nap

I have started napping.

Not often — once or twice a week, on the days when the morning has been particularly costly and the afternoon has a gap and there is no meeting until three. Twenty minutes, sometimes thirty. Never longer than thirty, because longer than thirty involves deep sleep and waking from deep sleep in the early afternoon produces a grogginess that costs more than it gives.

I am defending this practice.

Why it requires defending

Because there is a cultural assumption — particularly in the working and professional context, particularly in the context of a man who works from home and therefore must manage his own time — that napping is either indulgent or a symptom of inadequate nocturnal sleep that should be addressed at source rather than compensated for.

The inadequate-sleep argument has some merit in the abstract but misses the practical situation entirely. The practical situation is that the nocturnal sleep is disrupted by external factors I cannot fully control — a two-year-old who has decided that 2:17am is the correct time for a conversation about biscuits — and that the accumulating deficit is a fact of the current period of life rather than a problem with a solution available in the short term.

Given that the deficit is real and the source is not addressable, the choice is between carrying the deficit and partially repaying it when the opportunity exists. I have chosen to partially repay it. The nap is the payment mechanism.

What the evidence says

The evidence on napping is, it turns out, quite good. I looked at it properly because I wanted to know whether I was doing something genuinely useful or just rationalising a comfortable habit.

Short naps — the 20-to-30-minute variety, sometimes called "power naps" in the language of the productivity industrial complex, which I am going to ignore and just call naps — have been shown in multiple studies to improve alertness, cognitive performance, and mood in the hours following. The NASA study from the 1990s found that a 26-minute nap improved pilot performance by 34% and alertness by 100%. NASA pilots and I are in different professions with different stakes but the neuroscience is the same.

The mechanism is: the nap does not enter deep sleep. It provides restorative rest in the lighter stages, reduces adenosine (the chemical that accumulates during waking hours and produces the experience of tiredness), and resets the prefrontal cortex in ways that improve subsequent decision-making.

For someone who is managing the body-battery readings in the 30s, this is not a luxury. It is maintenance.

The logistics

The window is 1pm to 2pm, on the days it exists. I do not always take it — there are days when the work is going well and stopping feels wrong, or when the afternoon is too fragmented to produce a usable gap. But I treat it as available rather than as something that requires justification.

I use the Calm app — there is a sleep/nap section with a 20-minute guided rest that takes the brain down efficiently without the effort of unassisted descent into sleep. Some people can simply close their eyes at 1pm and be asleep in three minutes. I am not one of those people. The guided option removes the friction.

I set an alarm for 30 minutes from closing my eyes, not from falling asleep, so that the outer limit is consistent regardless of how quickly I actually sleep. I use a sleep mask. I have blackout blinds in the office, installed originally for video calls and serendipitously useful for this.

What it does for the afternoon

The afternoon after a nap is measurably better. I can track this on the Garmin, which is slightly absurd but useful: the Body Battery, which at 1pm might be at 28 after a difficult morning, is typically at 42 to 48 after thirty minutes. This is the difference between an afternoon that is effortful and an afternoon that is functional.

The 5pm handover — the closing ritual, the transition from work to parenting — is better on nap days. I arrive at it less depleted. I am more able to be in the room rather than merely present in it.

The social baggage

Claire found the napping development amusing when I mentioned it. Not dismissive — she has seen the Body Battery data and she works in a school where she cannot nap and is sometimes more depleted than I am by five o'clock, and her response is one of fair-minded envy rather than judgment.

My parents, were I to mention it, would probably regard a midday nap as evidence of something. Their generation did not nap. Their generation also had higher rates of cardiovascular disease and a cultural script around rest that treated it as an earned reward rather than a maintenance activity. I am not citing this as criticism. I am noting it as context.

The nap is a tool. It is a good tool. A 44-year-old man with two small children and a physically demanding early morning and a cognitively demanding afternoon is a person who can use a good tool.

I will keep napping. On the days it's available. Twenty to thirty minutes. The alarm set. The Garmin watching.

The Garmin, to its credit, approves.