Challenging the stigma of workplace napping

“Why should someone get paid to sleep on the job?” “I don’t have time to nap. I have too much work to do.” “You must be lazy if you take naps.” Despite growing awareness and appreciation of the value of sleep as well as resources, such as books by prominent sleep researchers [1, 2], directed toward general public consumption, there still remains a stigma related to napping. This negative perception is compounded when considering napping during working hours, resulting in frequently heard comments and questions like those above. How can we as sleep scientists, the subject matter experts who appreciate the broad scope of benefits to physical, emotional, and cognitive health conferred by naps, combat the negative optics of workplace napping? We begin by addressing these points of contention. While napping is essential for the health and development of young children, for many people it carries into adulthood as a habitual practice. In the United States, however, most working adults are not able to fit a nap into the day, largely due work demands and employer resistance to change workplace culture. Yet outside the United States, there are culturally different attitudes toward napping. In Spain and Italy, mid-afternoon breaks known as the siesta and riposo, respectively, are scheduled during the workday wherein napping often occurs. To suggest such a revision in business hours for the modern US workplace, however, may be unreasonable. Some Asian countries, such as China and Japan, encourage napping on the job. Japanese practice inemuri, sleeping or daydreaming during work, which is viewed as a sign of dedication to work to the point of exhaustion. Japanese businessmen also frequent capsule hotels containing sleep pods in order to reap the recuperative value of sleep during multi-day business negotiations. In the United States, coffee breaks and time spent browsing social media occur in part to boost and re-direct mental focus. What if more employers replaced coffee breaks with scheduled naps? Dr. James B. Maas, who coined the term “power nap,” encourages prioritizing sleep whenever possible, including implementing office napping policies [2]. Employees already seek out covert naps, and internet tips for “sneaking in a nap at work” reveal unsanitary (restroom) and uncomfortable (car) locations as top sites for napping. If employers embraced workplace napping, this option could produce a comparatively more marked and sustained increase in productivity. As many are sleep restricted during the work week, napping may confer performance advantages similar to data reported in the January 2019 issue of SLEEP [3]. Perhaps a better question may be “What is the cost of working fatigued?” According to a fatigue cost estimator from the National Safety Council and Brigham and Women’s Sleep Matters Initiative, health-related cost of lost productivity is $136 billion a year. Further, a reported 70% of Americans regularly experience insufficient sleep. Sleep loss, especially in the presence of underlying sleep disorders, results in reduced workplace productivity and increased absenteeism, health care expenditures, workplace accidents and injuries, and motor vehicle accidents during commutes. Thus, it may be costing employers more in the long-term not to allow workers to increase total daily sleep time and alertness with a brief nap during working hours than to prevent napping when needed. During an average work afternoon, a disproportion of the circadian alerting signal to the rising homeostatic sleep pressure occurs, resulting in increased sleepiness and reduced alertness. These factors, along with other impacted cognitive and emotional performance metrics, result in decreased productivity. There is a wealth of evidence that brief daytime naps of 10–20 minutes decrease subjective sleepiness, increase objective alertness, and improve cognitive performance (for review [4, 5]). Daytime napping facilitates creative problem solving and logical reasoning, boosts the capacity for future learning, and consolidates memories (for review [6]). These benefits are not restricted to those experiencing sleep deprivation. Even in well-rested individuals, napping can enhance alertness, performance, and productivity for several hours [4]. Daytime naps also allow for the regulation of emotions [7], relieve stress, and strengthen immune system function, reducing levels of the stress hormone norepinephrine and normalizing levels of interleukin-6 an immune-regulating molecule [8]. Taken together, allowing time to nap during the workday and reap the collective benefits will result in greater productivity and quality output rather than simply pushing through the fatigue, producing sub-standard work. This statement reflects the most damaging and pervasive stigma placed upon napping. Sleep deprivation, in some populations, is still considered a point of pride and a reflection of toughness. However, this argument is based largely in ignorance and companies are beginning a movement to counteract it. Along with recommendations to sleep 7–9 hours at night, daytime naps are being integrated into workplace culture in the world’s largest grossing tech, consulting, media, and retail companies: Google, Uber, Nike, Cisco, Zappos, Huffington Post, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Proctor & Gamble, and Ben & Jerry’s. Not only do these companies encourage workplace naps, but they provide accommodations, such as rooms secluded for the purpose of napping, often equipped with nap pods or beds. Even government agencies focused on fatigue countermeasures (e.g. NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration) provide napping pods in which employees can rest and restore cognitive and emotional resources. The challenge is to continue the spread of information regarding the wealth of benefits of napping to combat the numerous physical, mental, and financial consequences of fatigue. The long-term plan is to normalize and implement scheduled napping during working hours. One of the first steps in this process is to gather empirical evidence demonstrating the relative increase to workplace productivity with a brief nap compared to soldiering on without it. There exists a plethora of laboratory-based napping experiments. However, there is a dearth of applied research in the workplace examining the impact of a napping intervention on occupationally relevant performance measures. Building and disseminating this evidence will push us closer to a society that values napping and works to remove the stigma of taking that mid-day snooze. This material has been reviewed by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and there is no objection to its presentation and/or publication. The opinions or assertions contained herein are the private views of the authors and are not to be construed as official or as reflecting the position of the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense. None declared. Conflict of interest statement. None declared. The authors thank Dr. Tina Burke for her suggestions and amendments.