Jun 07 2002
Love/Hate: Naps
Love/Hate for Friday, June 7, 2002
Naps
Naps are never a good idea, unless you’re planning to stay out late for a really good cause, like seeing the New Year in while visiting Edinburgh, which is the most fun you’ll ever have while wearing a winter coat. I did that two years ago, and that may well be the last time I took a nap. Mostly, I think they are evil and mess up your body clock.
If you’re at home and nap, you won’t be able to go to sleep at the normal time, and will have a really hard time hauling your ass out of bed the next day. If you’re like me, it’s not so much the day immediately following the sleepless night where you feel exhausted, but the one after that. Two days of feeling tired and cranky because of a nap. Can it possibly be worth it?
If you’re travelling overseas, you’ve been stuck in a plane for hours, cramped and miserable, being fed weird food at weird hours and unable to sleep (though there’s always someone on the plane who sacks out before take-off and doesn’t wake up until landing or even later, flaunting their flagrant and almost certainly drug-induced sleep in front of everyone else). So you are jet-lagged and in the throes of what is essentially a travel hangover. But if you give in to the nap temptation, you’ll never reset your body clock to local time. Even though it’s hard, you should stay awake until 8 or 9 and then sleep for 12 hours or so, awaking refreshed and ready to have fun, your body on local time.
So for me, naps aren’t evil because they are self-indulgent. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who is more self-indulgent and less apologetic about it than I am. I just think the bad outweighs the good.