The Archives of Internal Medicine recently published the results of a study on the benefits of napping. The authors’ conclusion:
After controlling for potential confounders, siesta in apparently healthy individuals is inversely associated with coronary mortality, and the association was particularly evident among working men.
In other words, napping is good for your heart. Good news for proponents of the power nap, perhaps, but not the type of data you’d want to put in a PowerPoint presentation to your CEO. It still caught the eye of the media, however, with coverage in The New York Times, Workforce Management, and BusinessWeek.com, to name a few.
Despite the fact that you won’t find an on-site “sleeping room” in most American companies, buzz has been slowly building around the idea of workplace-sanctioned napping, and firms that permit on-the-job snoozing often tout it as a productivity-booster.
Workforce Management sees potential for adoption among employees who don’t work standard hours or who travel frequently, noting that that this covers one in four workers. Still, it will be tough to change the negative connotations of “sleeping on the job” into a positive. Even the recent study, the largest of its kind so far, includes a key caveat: napping is most beneficial for workers who are already healthy.
