Regular naps are 'key to learning' | Hacker News Reader

Regular naps are 'key to learning'

bbc.com

158 pointsyitchelle31 comments

It's ironic that sleeping at the office is absolutely not accepted, while taking large doses of psychoactive drugs like caffeine and nicotine is even encouraged. If you work with computers, then your brain is your absolutely most important tool. Going away to visit a conference is absolutely no problem. Sleeping for 15 minutes at the desk? Not ok.

Your observation is probably due to a cultural thing. I know in some Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia, I regularly see employees taking naps during the afternoon. Probably for about 20 to 30mins, then they wake up, freshen up and get back to it.

I have heard some central American countries also have similar practices. Maybe Mexico with their siesta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta).

You owe me 12000 hrs of sleep there. At least in large urban areas it is extremely uncommon. Probably if you are a boss with an actual office, but businesses tend to be not at all conductive to that.

Traditional office hours were 9-2 and 4-7 a generation ago, in order to allow people to go have lunch with their families, but even then you had to take the commute times into account. Blue collar workers only have one hour for lunch, but the expectation is that it will somehow be provided in situ.

You are right. In scandinavia, where I live, work is seen as almost a religion. It's the same culture in all european protestant countries. These are the same countries that drink the most coffee.

> These are the same countries that drink the most coffee.

I travel to Sweden a bit and was introduced to the concept of fika. I like it.

I wonder if this is in part due to the transition to open plan offices. It's hardly a great depiction of reality but the TV show Mad Men shows people regularly sleeping/napping in their office. The lack of privacy in modern offices is probably a prohibiting factor to napping.

It would be interesting to see how often people with an office and daybed (along with enough stature to shut their door and expect privacy) take advantage of it by napping.

I have my own office (I'm nothing special, all the engineers here do) and I usually take a nap in the afternoon. It's a no brainer in my book.

What company do you work for if I might ask?

I sleep in my car!

In the summer that is.

Our HQ office is quite remote, so if I drive 2 minutes, I can be next to the woods. I open all my windows, nap for 30 minutes with the sound of nature all around me. It's the best.

I can't wait for summer.

I'd do the same when I drove to work!

I've joked about giving an Ignite talk about "guerrilla napping". Here in SF I love napping in Yerba Buena Gardens with th construction workers and homeless. When I lived in Manhattan I could get short naps in the cathedrals, by learning to doze in a posture of prayer.

During the winter, do you do the same thing but with the windows closed? Not sure how feasible this is for folks without a car.

I work remotely, and typically take 12 minute naps either during lunch or closer to the end of the day to recharge if I feel tired.

I would have to dress up and waste fuel to heat up the car. The felt temperature is -40 out there.

My main advice is carry a book. You can nap anywhere if you have a thick book in your hands. "Oh, sorry. I was reading but fell asleep!"

Even worse, nobody snobs at the smokers who take a few 10-15 minute smoke breaks, however if you were to take a 30 minute nap you are 'sleeping on the job'.

My boss will occasionally take a ~20 minute nap on his couch in his office when he's really stressed.

Then again, when you're the cofounder, CTO, a multimillionaire from a previous sale, and you have a nice private office with a door that closes, you can do whatever you want.

You can't even take a nap in some places like on a couch in a mall; maybe polices change but I saw a mall guard waking up some tired soul.

This is about babies, but I think it's interesting how topics somehow relating to productivity and productive envrionements environments usually circle back too complaining about office layouts and culture. Open plan. Naps. Working hours.

While it's obviously true that workplaces dictate a lot about how we work. It's also conveniently out of our control. Somebody else's responsibility and fault. If you are power napping 3 days a day, trying standing desks, aggressively experimenting with diet and exercise ideas and otherwise pursuing productivity with cutting edge quirkiness I would sympathies. But, formats people registering the complaint it's the easy somebody-should-do-something.

Also :

Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. - http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

While pg was actually talking about recent trends making eccentricity a necessity (or really a side effect) of doing things "right," I think it's just an old thing becoming relevant to a new area (avoiding addiction). People genuinely pushing for maximal productivity, creativity and such have always been quirky. "I CAN't WORK HERE" screams the painter. Snappy frustrated geniuses with quirky demands, writers insisting on isolation, a bedsit, drugs, carefully timed and controlled naps.

Maximizing is quirky. It's also individual. The benefits of maximizing health, productivity, creativity, or other things can be incredible so the people who do it insist that it's the obviously rational choice. But eccentricity is by definition something we are usually averse to.

I hope this comment doesn't read negatively. I am entirely in favor of people wanting to implement some of these things in their life. But, find wheyier you can implement it. Don't waste time lamenting that the world (or your workplace) isn't like that. Accept quirkiness as the price.

I agree that the onus to improve people's lives should not be solely on external forces. We can be independent enough to figure out ways to - as in this case - get a nap somewhere during the day.

It is still valid to point out, though, that the structures of society heavily influence our behaviours. I remember years ago afternoons struggling through the hour after lunch, physically fighting to keep my eyes open in the office. It never occurred to me then that there was a solution other than the coffee station. Some direction from work, and a culture where a nap was encouraged would have helped the younger me a lot.

That isn't blame, or complaint. But thinking only of how I can get around my society's lack of awareness of napping is a little individualistic. Why not look to improve the structures as well?

We have a server room that is almost empty these days. I unabashedly advocate for a cot or a hammock in there.

I like to think of sleep as clearing my working memory: the important stuff gets saved and the cruft is cleared and, one hopes, that a bit of subconscious processing takes place.

It is so much more effective to sleep for 10 or 20 minutes and come back to a problem fresh than struggle with your brain's garbage collection for several hours.

There was a science thing several months ago about how one of the functions of sleep was to flush toxins from your brain. So you're not wrong?

Here's the NPR story on that research: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10/18/236211811/brains-...

Was it Sleepless In America?

If it was, I think it aired again recently. I didn't realize it wasn't new.

Highly recommend watching it. Not only does sleep help your brain flush the toxins that are produced as a byproduct of your brain, but cancer can grow twice as fast in tired mice compared to well rested mice. Do yourself a favor and check it out if you haven't seen it.

Interesting. What about adult learning, do naps help with learning, and by how much?

Absolutely! Mandatory reading (very long but VERY worth) "Good sleep, good learning, good life" [1] by Dr Piotr Wozniak

[1] http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm

The things I've read suggest that for adults adequate sleep is the key, not necessarily when you get it. A person who gets as much sleep as they need at night might not benefit from a nap; whereas a person who does not, would.

Babies grow more rapidly than adults, so everything happens on a faster schedule. They eat proportionally more food, and more frequently, excrete proportionally more, sleep longer and more frequently, etc.

They seem to: http://m.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201002/tak...

Original paper:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093247/

"These effects were specific to episodic learning, with no between-session change expressed in procedural motor-skill learning, or in measures of alertness or reaction time"

The memory relevant for developers is mostly procedural, i.e conceptual memory, i believe. So napping might not be useful(or further research needed).

I found that babies needs routine and pattern of 'rituals'. That works miracles (1 year running to bed for a sleep or demanding lunch). Not sure how it translates to adults.

Does this apply for adults also? May be this is the reason why tech gaint companies like Google have sleeping pods in their offices!

I've worked in three separate Google offices, and never saw someone use a nap pod once. I tend to vary my task depending on the time of day an my energy level, e.g. code in the morning, review other people's CL's and do boring non-coding tasks in the afternoon. I think the focus on napping is more part of HN echo chamber (wish there was a less pejorative word, but it's a real thing) than something most people want to do, since Googlers have every opportunity and never do so.

I took a nap at work once during my lunch time and I was woken up by the silent cold stares. Never took a nap again. :-(

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