Snooze Alert : It seems nap times aren’t just good for the preschool set. Researchers say it’s time adults woke up to the dangers of sleep deprivation. Catching a few Zs at the office could mean a more alert and organized employee--and help to ensure a safer workplace.
On a plump futon at Ben and Jerry’s ice cream company, on the silky grass in the park next to Esprit headquarters, in soft-lit chambers above Levi’s Plaza, a growing number of men and women are interrupting the workday to do what comes naturally:
Take a nap.
Like new parents and student doctors, firefighters and kindergartners, corporate America is discovering the restorative power of 20 to 30 minutes of sweet inertia.
And not a wink too soon, say sleep experts.
In a nation where 100 million citizens are seriously sleep deprived, taking a nap has become “a heroic act,” says pioneer sleep researcher Dr. William Dement of Stanford University.
Armed with evidence from the laboratory that the human body is designed for not one but two sessions of sleep every 24 hours, Dement and other sleep specialists recently launched “Wake Up America 1994.” It’s a campaign designed both to boost sleep’s image as a positive, even necessary, pastime and persuade more Americans to “take sleep seriously”--especially naps.
Forget Homer Simpson and Dagwood Bumstead. People who break up the workday with a nap are putting to bed the myth that daytime sleep is an indulgence of dull, lazy or unmotivated workers.
In fact, sleep experts say, prudent nappers may be among the more perceptive, organized, and aggressive employees--once they get their Zs.
In his book “Stress and the Power Nap”--billed as “the book designed to put you to sleep”--St. Louis psychologist Dennis Shea calls on big business to embrace the nap as an economical quick-fix for burned-out execs.
While many could benefit from more sleep, those who need it most are workers whose drowsiness could endanger themselves or others.
Sleep deprivation may have contributed to some of the world’s most frightening accidents: the poison gas leak at Bhopal, the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle.
When the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground shortly after midnight March 24, 1989, the third mate at the helm, investigators determined, was “asleep on his feet.”
The horror stories continue. Sleep or lack of it contributes to an estimated 200,000 vehicular accidents and 10,000 traffic fatalities each year in North America, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
On Aug. 18, 1993, at 4:56 p.m., a Douglas DC-8 plowed into the ground just short of the runway at the U.S. Naval Air Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That crew--like the occupants of too many other cockpits, sleep experts say--needed a nap, according to a report by the National Transportation Safety Board.
According to a recent report in the New York Times, all three members of a flight crew--pilot, co-pilot and engineer--will occasionally fall asleep while their jumbo jet flies on automatic pilot, a violation of FAA rules.
On one occasion, it was reported, a flight attendant assigned to keep the pilot awake also fell asleep.
“In terms of lost productivity and multimillion-dollar lawsuits, more and more companies are beginning to see the benefits (of naps in the workplace),” says Marvin Miles of Stanford’s Sleep Research Center.
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Everybody knows the symptoms of dangerous drowsiness: irritability, short-term memory loss and spontaneous loss of consciousness. Unlike most remedies, a nap offers immediate and complete relief. And it can be self-administered before, during or after symptoms appear.
Dement admits he personally does little napping because “my employers don’t encourage it.”
“So, we still have a long way to go, I guess,” concedes Dement’s protege Mark Rosekind, who conducts FAA-approved cockpit rest studies for the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffet Field.
Although crew naps are still prohibited on most airplanes, Rosekind’s research showed that, “right stuff” or not, pilots score better on take-offs and landings if they are properly rested. Such research comes as no surprise to those in the cockpit, says Rosekind, who is promoting a new sleep education project for airlines and their employees.
“As little pockets of our society become better informed,” Rosekind says, “good sleep hygiene will be valued just as much as a good diet and exercise regimen. . . . But we’ve got to get past casting aspersions when we see somebody sleeping. What we should be saying is, ‘Gee, there’s someone trying to be healthy and safe.’ ”
Esprit and Levi Strauss & Co. are in the vanguard of corporations that acknowledge the occasional need for employee naps. Although coffee breaks have long been a part of the workday, companies are finding that a nap or exercise break can be even more refreshing. But even though science now supports the boost in productivity, few companies want to be known for paying workers to sleep on the job.
Even at those companies whose flextime allows naps, image-conscious executives are wary about how their unwritten rest policies may be viewed by outsiders.
At Levi, a top vice president said no one at the corporation was interested in discussing the chambers where San Francisco employees can recline during working hours. “Myself, I’ve never even seen the inside of one of those rooms,” John Onoda said. “I’m way too busy.”
At Ben and Jerry’s Vermont headquarters, where stressed workers also are treated to free massages, the beloved futon was reported “lost somewhere in the building” when a reporter inquired about getting a photograph.
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Many living organisms have circadian ( circa means around , dia means day ) clocks in their brains that regulate physiological and behavioral functions on a 24-hour basis. This clock regulates sleep and wake patterns, body temperature, hormones, performance, mood, digestion and other functions.
Humans are genetically programmed to sleep at certain times during the circadian cycle: once in the middle of the night and again in the middle of the afternoon. Scientists insist that the universal longing to close one’s eyes at such times has nothing to do with warm rooms, heavy meals or even boring meetings.
“We have some beautiful scientific studies that show the two periods of maximal sleepiness are from 3 to 5 a.m. and 3 to 5 p.m. It may be what High Tea is all about, and why siestas are so popular near the Equator,” Rosekind says.
In less frantic cultures, afternoon naps are nothing to be ashamed of. In many countries (Japan and the United States among the most notable exceptions), such rhythms of life are ritualized and, like the Chinese xiuxi , protected against Western “progress.”
Seizing what scientists call that “trough in alertness” for a nap, researchers say, is probably a good idea for many workers. But it is particularly recommended for the one in four of us who on any given day wake up before we’ve had a sufficient night’s sleep.
Cornell University psychologist James Maas says most Americans sleep seven hours a night or less, sacrificing the crucial eighth hour of productive, dream-rich sleep.
Today, there is “more sleepiness in more people more of the time than ever before,” says David F. Dinges, a sleep specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. But until recently, no one seemed to care.
Until 1993, when a Congress-empaneled sleep commission issued its “National Sleep Alert.” Like an alarm clock you can’t turn off, it demanded attention.
Sleep deprivation, the commission warned, was costing the United States at least $16 billion a year. That does not include the $70 million Americans spend every year on over-the-counter remedies to fight fatigue.
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Blame it on Thomas Edison. His discoveries turned night into day, making it possible to work all day and all night--which it seems is what he wanted to do.
Ignoring all the rules for healthy sleep, Edison apparently lived on a few hours rest at night as well as a series of naps and micro-sleeps--the few minutes or seconds of unconsciousness the brain grabs automatically to recover sleep lost at night.
“But what do you expect in an industrial society?” asks Wilse Webb, a University of Florida expert on the evolution of sleep patterns. “(Napping) is a sweet piece of biologically natural behavior, but it’s becoming vestigial. Every study we’ve seen shows the more the world is commercialized, the less likely it is to value naps.”
Yet the thought of a world without naps gives Dement and other sleep researchers nightmares.
“At this moment, sleepy individuals are operating millions of motor vehicles, including high-tonnage trucks. They are operating trains, airplanes and ships of all kinds,” Dement says. “They are in responsible decision-making positions: monitoring nuclear power plants and space missions, controlling air traffic and staffing strategic military installations.”
The danger to the American public is so great, sleep researchers say, that they have launched a serious legislative effort to create a permanent government agency to monitor, even regulate, the wakefulness of the nation’s workers.
A national sleep police to enforce nap time? It could be a worker’s dream come true.
