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In Defense of Napping: A How To Guide

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Naps have a bad reputation in America, where sleep deprivation is worn like a Boy Scout merit badge. The national motto, thanks to the industrious Puritans, might easily have been "You snooze, you lose." Or, as Benjamin Franklin put it, "Up, sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough." Thomas Edison, who thought future Americans would sleep far less, declared, "Really, sleep is an absurdity, a bad habit." Vladimir Nabakov called sleep "the most moronic fraternity in the world." Warren Zevon rephrased all this for a different era when he wrote "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," a song heard to its finest freight-train effect ("I'm drinking heartbreak motor oil and Bombay gin") on his early-'80s live album, 'Stand in the Fire'. We miss you, Warren, now that you're off taking your dirt nap.

A stigma is attached to a fondness for sleeping, especially during the daytime. This we have to fix, because dire things happen when you're sleep-deprived. The pilot at the helm of the Exxon Vadez, which spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into pristine Alaskan waters, hadn't slept for 18 hours. The driver of the Walmart truck that slammed into Tracy Morgan's limousine bus, killing one person and badly injuring Morgan and three others, allegedly hadn't slept for 28 hours. Bill Clinton said, "Every important mistake I've made in my life, I've made because I was so tired." It's surreal to think that a nap might have spared the nation the Lewinsky scandal, which paved the way for the presidency of George W. Bush. His administration woke up the world in all the wrong ways, as if Bush were an air horn in human form.

The laureate of the nap, in the Western world at any rate, is Winston Churchill. Not for him the 20-minute head-on-desk doze. (Power naps, like PowerBars, make me feel worse, not better.) Here is perhaps his greatest utterance: "You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do. Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one -- well, at least one and a half."

I have lived by these words for nearly a decade, as if they were tattooed on the underside of my eyelids. While they contain everything you need to know about golden-daylight slumber and are a pristine statement of fundamentals, I'd like to extend them a bit. There are some refinements of which you should be aware.

Wake up early every day -- say, 6:00 A.M. -- and put in around seven hours of committed work. It's easier to perform this labor when you know a sweet reward is coming. As Iris Murdoch advised in "The Sea, The Sea," "One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better." Second only to sex, naps are life's most significant frugal pleasure.

Break at 1:00 P.M. or so for lunch, and make it delicious. You need to anchor yourself down a bit for a decent nap; have a chocolate-chip cookie and a glass of milk. You will need a cold, quiet room, ideally away from dog flatulence, though I sometimes allow my wheezing old black Lab to lumber upstairs with me. Now take off your clothes (my wife calls these "pants-off naps") and climb into bed. Part of the pleasure for me is using my iPhone for about 30 minutes before I go to sleep to catch up on news and the yak on my Twitter feed. Light from smartphones wrecks your ability to sleep at night, studies say, but we're talking about the daytime here. I'll also play a game or two of online backgammon. It's relaxing, even if I lose. I once confronted a guy whose online handle was Bezos. I'm not sure it was Jeff, but I thrashed him anyway, in the name of my friends who own, or formerly owned, bookstores.

Upon waking, the rookie can still make mistakes. The first is to forgo taking a shower. To properly jump-start your second day, you need to rinse away the cobwebs. If you're in a dandified mood, you can even put on fresh, crisp clothes. The second common mistake is to let postnap guilt sour your mood. Nix this by getting back to your desk for a solid three or four hours, breaking only when it's time to make a martini and give in to the evening.

- Dwight Garner

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