Napping at work: How forward-thinking companies are incorporating it to boost well-being

A 7am call means a 4:30 alarm, and by two in the afternoon I am doing precision work on somebody’s eyeline with the reflexes of a woman who has been awake for ten hours. Every freelancer I know has a version of that hour. What changed my mind about napping was not a wellness trend, it was realising how specific the research is about what a short sleep can and cannot buy back.

The afternoon dip is not about what you ate

It is built into the clock. Human alertness follows a circadian rhythm with a strong dip in the early hours of the morning and a second, smaller one in the early afternoon, and it shows up in people who skip lunch entirely. Blaming the sandwich is comforting because it implies you can eat your way out of it. You largely cannot.

What you can do is stop treating that hour as a personal failing and schedule around it. On set I now move anything fiddly, such as a cut crease or a lash strip, either side of that window, and leave the straightforward work in the middle of it. That is a scheduling decision, and it costs nothing.

What the NASA study actually found, and what it did not

It found a measurable improvement in two specific things. Mark Rosekind and colleagues studied 21 pilots on transoceanic flights and gave half of them a 40-minute rest opportunity on the flight deck. Those pilots fell asleep in under six minutes and slept an average of about 26 minutes. Measured against the no-nap group, the rested pilots showed 34 per cent better reaction times and 54 per cent higher physiological alertness, measured by EEG, through the descent and landing.

Two things that study did not show: that napping makes you more creative, and that it improves how well you do complex work over a whole day. Reaction time and alertness are narrow measures. They matter enormously in a cockpit and rather less when you are writing a strategy document.

Sleep inertia is the reason people say napping does not work for them

Sleep inertia is the fog you wake into if you surface from deep sleep, and it can last twenty minutes or more. That is the entire argument for the 20-minute ceiling: below it you rarely reach slow-wave sleep, so you come back online almost immediately.

If you have tried napping and felt wrecked afterwards, the odds are you slept for fifty minutes on a sofa, not that your body is unsuited to it. Set an alarm before you lie down, and treat it as non-negotiable.

The scale of the problem it is being asked to solve

It is a large problem, which is why the fix looks small by comparison. RAND Europe’s 2016 analysis of the economic cost of insufficient sleep estimated that the UK loses up to 1.86 per cent of GDP and just over 200,000 working days a year to sleep deprivation. That is the backdrop against which nap rooms started appearing in company literature.

There is also a strand of research suggesting habitual napping is not merely neutral for the brain. A 2023 Mendelian randomisation study in Sleep Health, using UK Biobank data, found an association between being genetically predisposed to habitual daytime napping and slightly larger total brain volume, a difference the authors compared to 2.6 to 6.5 years of ageing. It found no effect on reaction time or visual memory, and it is a genetic association rather than a recommendation to nap.

In the UK, you may already have the right you are asking for

You probably do, and hardly anyone uses it properly. Under the Working Time Regulations 1998, a worker whose daily working time exceeds six hours is entitled to one uninterrupted rest break of at least 20 minutes, to be taken away from the workstation, and not tacked onto the start or the end of the day. Whether it is paid depends on your contract.

Nothing in that says the break has to be spent eating a meal deal at your desk, which is exactly what it usually is. Twenty uninterrupted minutes away from your workstation is, to the minute, the nap the research supports. The obstacle in most workplaces is not policy, it is that nobody wants to be the first person seen doing it.

What the companies with nap pods actually prove

Less than the headlines imply. Google installed MetroNaps EnergyPods at its Mountain View campus around 2010, Zappos built rest space into its Las Vegas headquarters, and Ben & Jerry’s nap room in Vermont has been written about for years. These are well-documented perks at unusually well-resourced employers, not controlled trials of workplace napping.

The transferable part is not the furniture. It is the permission: a quiet, dim, bookable room and a culture where using it is unremarkable. A stationery cupboard with a chair and a closed door does the same job for nothing.

Three things people ask me about this

Will a nap ruin my sleep that night?

It can, if it is long or late. Keep naps short and before about 3pm, and most people find their night is unaffected. If you already struggle to fall asleep, napping is one of the first habits a sleep clinic will ask you to drop, and that advice takes precedence over anything here.

What if I cannot actually fall asleep in twenty minutes?

Lie down anyway. Quiet rest with your eyes shut and no screen recovers a useful amount of alertness even when you do not sleep, and the pressure to fall asleep is itself the thing keeping you awake. Treat sleep as optional and it tends to turn up.

Is coffee not simpler?

Caffeine masks tiredness rather than reducing it, and it lingers for hours. The two are not exclusive: some people drink a coffee immediately before a 20-minute nap, so the caffeine arrives as they wake. It works for a lot of people and it is miserable for anyone caffeine-sensitive.

The version that works in an ordinary job

1. Pick your slot from your own energy pattern, not the clock. Mine is around 2:30pm and yours may be an hour either side.
2. Book the 20 minutes in your calendar like any other commitment, so it is not the first thing to go.
3. Find dark and quiet, in that order. A car, an empty meeting room and a coat over your eyes all qualify.
4. Set the alarm for 20 minutes before you lie down, not after.
5. Get up and get bright light on your face immediately. Standing outside for two minutes does more than the coffee will.

I do this in a make-up chair with the mirror lights off, roughly three days out of five on a long job, and I would not go back. It has not made me a better-rested person. It has made the last four hours of a twelve-hour day noticeably less of a slog, and that was the whole ambition.

This is general information and not medical advice. Persistent daytime sleepiness, loud snoring or unrefreshing sleep can point to a treatable condition such as sleep apnoea, and those are worth raising with your GP rather than napping around.

Sources: Rosekind MR et al., NASA Ames Research Center, crew rest study of transoceanic flight crews, 1994; RAND Europe, Why Sleep Matters: quantifying the economic costs of insufficient sleep, 2016; Paz V et al., Sleep Health, Mendelian randomisation study of daytime napping in the UK Biobank, 2023; Working Time Regulations 1998, regulation 12.