Why Napping is So Damn Great

Restaurant workers nap on tables in Beijing, July 15, 2020 [AP/Ng Han Guan]

“A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway,” wrote Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, in 1883. This delusion, he continued, is “the love of work.”

Progress, Lafargue claimed, emerged not from relentless labor, but from the sort of creativity that is free to surface when one is allowed to relax. He cites the ancient Greeks as having the correct attitude toward work: contempt.

Now, new research has proved once again what we all know. Napping is healthy! It is linked to better mental agility and lower inflammation.

Modern Greeks have, in fact, preserved the nap. (They have this norm in common with many countries who do not share America’s culture of unrelenting work.) Journalist Dan Buettner dubbed the Greek island of Ikaria, “the island where people forget to die.” Their secret? Moderate work, a robust social life, healthy local food, sex and naps.

Naps work well because there is no relentless drive to work, and, among the self-sufficient islanders, few bosses. “Have you noticed that no one wears a watch here?” a local physician asked a researcher. “No clock is working correctly. When you invite someone to lunch, they might come at 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. We simply don’t care about the clock here.”

A number of recent books contrast the importance of sleep with its low esteem in our culture. The brilliant 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores sleep as the last site of refusal of round-the-clock exploitation, and Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the U.S. Military shows how psychiatry used sleep to manipulate and treat veterans – who then fought back for control over their sacred somnolence.

At Day's Close: Night in Times Past reveals how sleep used to be different (to the surprise of many reviewers, it turns out some Europeans used to have two sleeps per night). And a brilliant novella by author Karen Russell paints a world in which lethal insomnia has become a horrific plague, and the last healthy people donate sleep to the ailing.

But reclaiming rest is only possible if we reduce the amount of work everyone has to do, and to do that, we have to change the way we value labor. Some thinkers are hard at work putting work in its place.

Scholar Kathi Weeks argues in The Problem with Work that we should pursue a post-work society where value is placed on care instead of labor. Writer and labor journalist Sarah Jaffe’s new book, Work Won’t Love You Back, criticizes the popular exhortation to “do what you love” as a con that works to capitalists’ benefit.

Once we see that we are not our work, our imaginations can run wild. The labor movement, with the slogan, "eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will" fought bloody battles to get the 40-hour work week. Why not aim next for a 32-hour work week, as some have tried in New Zealand? Or five-hour work days?

After all, as David Graeber showed in “Bullshit Jobs,” we’re not exactly working long hours doing things that need doing. With fewer hours of work, we could give more hours to care, community, learning, fun and the things that generally make life worth living. And that extends, of course, to naps.