This is not a Roger Ramjet post about how you should never sleep, or how you should try to suffer through three and a half hours every night so you can maximize your work time.
As a sane person, I believe getting adequate sleep is the most fundamental health habit. If sleep isn’t good, nothing is good.
Beyond that, sleep is one of my favorite subjects and pastimes.
In the Writers Room today, we talked specifically about naps, who takes them, how they take them, and why.
Some of us prefer what I call the Churchill nap. Winston explained it best himself:
“You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more.”
Others prefer the Edison nap, where you sit up in a chair, hold a spoon over a tin pan, and wake the moment the spoon falls out of your hand and hits the pan.
All naps fall somewhere between these two extremes. The type of nap I choose depends on the day’s responsibilities. Both extremes work for me, though the Churchill tends to eat into my next night’s sleep, which can start a vicious cycle and even lead to biphasic sleep.
On busy days, I do a nap similar to the Edison. I call it the Couch Sleep. I sleep sitting (not lying) on the couch. I usually get no more than a single REM cycle (45 minutes) or less, which is all it takes to refresh.
Anecdotally, it seems a lot of us aren’t sleeping as well as we used to. This study on how mobile phone use effects sleep makes me wonder if something’s going on.
Do you nap? How is your sleep in general? Let me know in the comments.
Today’s writing (two more chapters of The Onion Story) is below. Instead of posting all my work on Sunday’s accountability post, I’m spreading it out this week so I don’t break Substack. Read it and weep…
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