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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I could physically fall asleep at work. Are people really this tired while they're at their offices?

It seems like if you're so tired while you're at work that you actually want to take a nap, then maybe there is another underlying problem.

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Thats natural human behavior.

The biology term is 'arousal' and there are peaks in the morning and late afternoon, but around 1pm-ish your body naturally slows down and wants sleep. The effect is much stronger in children, but it's there with adults.

You don't feel like you could fall asleep because you've trained yourself not to, and you're most likely taking wakefulness promoting drugs all day.

> It seems like if you're so tired while you're at work that you actually want to take a nap, then maybe there is another underlying problem.

There is: tiredness. Often, but not always, due to lack of sleep. A nap is the solution.

If you need 8 glasses of water a day to be at peak-performance but for whatever reason only manage to drink 7 in the morning, why not have that final glass sometime during the day? Same with sleep.

In fact it's absurd to think everybody can store energy upfront and power through 9 hours of activity without falling off towards the end.

Naps are natural.

But it's not normal for adults to sleep so badly that you need naps during the day, apart from having very young kids. So other than that I'd say there may well be an underlying problem.

If you could help me and 25% of everyone [1] figure out that underlying problem, we would be super grateful!

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/articles/sleepd...

I was going to argue that that article itself lists a number of underlying problems and what can be done about them, but that number is much higher than I expected and clearly there are many people who just don't sleep well during the night.

Consider my opinion changed.

Or perhaps not, considering there are cultures where a noon or early-afternoon nap is not particularly out of the ordinary. No one's really talking here, in any case, of needing a daytime nap, but rather of finding one beneficial to productivity.

Yes, work is not "natural", but we have to sit and do it every day because that's the way it is. So the problem here is to find tricks to keep being productive all day long, and naps are one of them.

Offices are much less natural than afternoon naps.

Wow, really? Not only does daytime napping improve health even if you are already healthy adult who gets adequate sleep, there's ample evidence our (pre-working in an office for 10 hours straight) ancestors did so regularly, which persists in many cultures to this day.

I suggest you recalibrate your definition of "normal".

I work from home-office and try to lie down for 10 minutes in the afternoon.

I don't really fall asleep, but I found that just closing my eyes for this short amount of time gives me a tremendous boost of relaxation, especially when my mind gets into a dreamy state for a minute or so.

It's funny, but I find a bit of the opposite. If I get up from my desk and pace the hallways for 10 minutes, that'll give me far more energy than a nap... not sure what's more socially acceptable though: sleeping on the job or pacing like a madman.

I can easily if I had a quiet place. Also if I don’t sleep enough (e.g. kids awake at night + long day) I just start dreaming with eyes open.

The amount of sleep a person needs and how long you can go without involuntarily fallin asleep seems to vary wildly though; a friend who I have reason to believe talks about working continiously for 3 days to catch a deadline. (The explanation was along the lines of: it hurts but what to do?) An ex colleague was also known to work through the night between working days.

A lot of people have a low after lunch. When I work from home I often nap for 20 minutes around 2pm and I think this makes rest of the day much better.

Another take: if you're so wound up while you're at work that you can't take a nap, maybe there is another underlying problem!

Creative problem solving mindset needs room for thoughts to wander, and is incompatible with hurry.

The human body has both physical and mental limits at which point rest is the preferred course of action. So if you're not getting tired from your work, it sounds like you're not working hard enough.

This is not about being "tired". It's about resetting your nervous system which for different people works differently. I often think about it as about a distinction between sprinters vs. marathon runners. Some people have biological predispositions to perform better in one of those.

I don't think that making any type of generalisations (eg. "people shouldn't be that tired") makes much sense.

> maybe there is another underlying problem.

The problem is that sometimes I am in the zone from like 10pm - 1am.

So naturally I am tired during the day. A few minutes to nap for 3 hours of "in the zone" ain't a bad trade off for a company in my opinion.

But then why not just go home three hours early, when you work that time later in the day? A short bike ride or walk in the forest could do more for you than napping and then making more hours at work.

Why is this a problem? You may not work in the same environment as other people. That doesn't make them necessarily have some "underlying problem."

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