Take Your Perks Seriously (and Lying Down)

Much has been written lately about the growing legion of Americans who work at home, but hardly anyone has paid attention to what might, with nary a snicker, be termed the most eye-opening aspect of this trend: the remarkable resurgence of the siesta.

With no one to frown on their recumbency, the monkish few who work cloistered in their own houses are well-suited to the siesta. The word itself comes from the Latin sexta, or sixth, as in sexta hora, for “sixth hour.” To the ancient Romans, this was midday (they simply divided the daylight by 12), and in monastic life the sext is the service performed at noon. If you start work at 9 a.m., of course, the sixth hour is 3 p.m., when the god you are most likely to worship, albeit secretly, is Morpheus.

Perhaps there is good reason for this conspiracy of silence. Surely people who work at home but are employed by others don’t want bosses and co-workers to know that they sack out for an hour every afternoon while everyone else has to stumble through the rest of the day in the usual post-prandial stupor.

But even the self-employed have reason for secrecy. Why give clients reason to believe that their high-powered consultants and freelancers nap like little children every day? And then there is the delicate subject of spousal equality. When my wife was still practicing dentistry, she spent difficult afternoons rushing from patient to patient, soothing toothaches and fears, while I might be sound asleep. For writers, there is always a thin line between working and not working. Getting into bed, in the eyes of the uninformed, might rashly be considered crossing it.

Enough, I say. It is time for us work-at-homes to acknowledge what all of us know but none of us will say, which is that we take naps. And why not? Many of us forgo steady paychecks, cushy offices, lucrative benefits, impressive titles and other perks, working instead as what demographers like to call “lone eagles.” We’re lean, keen-eyed, independent, soaring high above the bureaucracies of corporate America and, OK, sometimes a little sleepy.

So we nap. Perhaps our daily visits to the Land of Nod give many of us the waking edge we need to remain upright on the high wire of self-employment. Greatness, after all, is associated with napping. Napoleon Bonaparte, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison and John Kennedy were all nappers--to say nothing of Dagwood Bumstead and Homer Simpson--and I find it hard to believe that

Marcel Proust and Walker Percy, who often wrote in bed, never took the opportunity to catch a little shut-eye between chapters.

Besides, history is on our side. Society’s current way of organizing the workday is a relatively recent manifestation of advanced industrial capitalism. It goes with the idea of people commuting some distance to work together, perhaps on an assembly line. Thus, the siesta so familiar in the Mediterranean world has wilted in some places under pressure of modernization, to say nothing of air-conditioning.

There was a time, however, when things were different. Almost everyone worked at home, and people’s schedules were set by the rising and setting of the sun. They spent many more hours in bed than we do, and were in all likelihood better rested. (At my age, many of them were, in fact, dead, but that’s not tiring, either.)

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Today, as we enter a postindustrial era, a chorus of wide-eyed experts warns that we as a nation are seriously sleep-deprived. The government estimates that at least 50,000 auto accidents a year are caused by sleepy drivers, and a study of 2,000 people, published in the journal Sleep, found that lack of sleep affects mood, thinking and motor skills (duh).

The National Sleep Foundation, no doubt burning the midnight oil, recently calculated that sleeplessness costs the U.S. economy some $18 billion a year in lost productivity.

Once again, we who work at home are at the cutting edge of rejuvenating the American economy, and we’re so productive we’re even doing so in our sleep! Under such circumstances, is it any wonder that Stanford University sleep pioneer Dr. William Dement says that taking a nap these days has become “a heroic act”?

With all due modesty, let me say that my own heroism in this department lies in doing what comes naturally. Instead of attending pointless meetings, reporting to middle managers whose function is wholly mysterious and wasting hours commuting, we who work at home understand that there is no shame in the body’s irresistible urgings. Scientists have established beyond doubt that humans are genetically programmed to sleep at certain times of day, and the sleepiest times of all are between 3 and 5 a.m., which most of us accept, and between 3 and 5 p.m., which, for reasons of continued employment, most of us have to reject.

For those of us who work at home in California (and don’t have school-age children bursting into the house), afternoons are an ideal time to hit the hay. The East Coast is closed, as is much of the Midwest, so the phones have slowed down, and chances are so have you. Lunch is settling in your stomach; whatever you’re doing is hopelessly boring, and you’ve begun fighting to concentrate. Time to heroically rejuvenate the economy!

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Napping skills among those who work at home vary, of course. During my salad days as a napper, when I lived alone, I would actually get undressed and go back to bed every afternoon, setting the alarm for 45 minutes. (I have driven conventionally employed friends almost to tears of envy with an offhand account of this.) Now that life is more complicated, I try for a sofa, but will settle for a carpeted floor. Earplugs can be surprisingly helpful, especially in ignoring the phone.

(Anyone who works at home should be screening calls in any event; most of them are from bored friends in regular jobs looking for someone to talk to or from telemarketers trading on human decency to make a quick buck. People who need you can leave a message, and if you’re awake you can even pick up while they’re doing so. It’ll make them feel great.)

Is napping good for everyone? It’s hard to say. The Mayo Clinic Health Letter asserts that 80% of people who nap have trouble sleeping at night, but fails to draw the obvious conclusion that perhaps they nap by day because they have trouble sleeping at night. The Mayo letter suggests you take a nap-free week to record when you go to bed, how long it takes to fall asleep, how often you wake up, how many hours you sleep and how you feel in the morning. During the following week, take naps and record the same stuff, plus how you feel after your midday snooze. If you are going to nap, the folks at Mayo suggest a half-hour at midafternoon. Longer can give you problems at night.

Although several companies, including MacWorld magazine, Ben & Jerry’s and Levi Strauss & Co., have acknowledged providing employees with places to nap, most employers force workers to extemporize--for instance, by sleeping in the cockpit of the 747 they’re supposed to be flying. Thus, we who work at home are the shock troops in reviving the glorious siesta tradition. As our numbers grow, so will the number of nappers. Things will get slower and slower around midafternoon, perhaps offering encouragement to the bleary-eyed everywhere who guzzle coffee wishing instead for a place to get horizontal.

Workers of the world, unite! The time has come to demand the balm that surpasses even higher pay, which you aren’t going to get anyway. Don’t be afraid; ask for a place to lie down. Silence, in my book, is somnambulism.

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Daniel Akst, a former Cutting Edge columnist, is the author of the novel “St. Burl’s Obituary.” He can be reached via e-mail at akst@worldnet.att.net