How to Take the Perfect Weekend Nap

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Not actually about books or writing, but PG thinks a well-rested author is more productive than one who is not.

From GQ:

In 2011, then-deputy NBA commissioner Adam Silver told the New York Timesthat “everyone in the league office knows not to call players at 3 p.m.” This is not because 3 p.m. is when NBA players gather for a massive, secret game of knockout, although they should make that happen. It’s because 3 p.m. is known throughout the league as naptime.

Yes, naptime. NBA players—and most professional athletes who play at night, for that matter—cherish their pregame naps. And these are not necessarily quick snoozes, either; the pros measure their naps in hours, not minutes.

Thanks to the unfortunate conditions imposed by late-stage capitalism, daily naps are not an option for most people during the workweek, unless you’re employed by a Silicon Valley tech behemoth that offers to funnel you into cloisters of pods for a recharging period meant to achieve maximum productivity.

. . . .

For one, pro athletes are onto something with the mid-afternoon nap schedule, which is linked to our circadian physiology. The late afternoon is when the body experiences a natural dip in body temperature as well as energy levels—a process independent of what time you wake up on a Saturday.

On the weekends, you can pay a little more attention to your homeostatic drive—the internal urge to pass the hell out—which increases every waking hour and is amplified by physical activity and social interactions. “It’s completely separate from the cues you’re getting in your environment with light and temperature,” says David Samson, Ph.D., a sleep anthropologist at the University of Toronto. This is why your homeostatic drive is all out of whack after traveling internationally. But even at home, it’s possible you might get sleepy and want to take a nap in, say, the early evening. If you feel said nap coming on, it’s okay to embrace it.

. . . .

Samson cautions that as a field of scientific inquiry, nap research is still unsettled. But from what he and others have been able to glean, the Hadza [an African hunter-gatherer tribe] are napping, on average, for about one hour a day. “In the West, the average nap is half an hour, in the studies I’ve seen,” Samson says. “The Hadza are clocking in at 55 minutes, so almost double the length.”

Link to the rest at GQ