The Deliciously Profitable Price of a Nap

If you were taught napping means you don’t want it badly enough, know that Edison, Dalí, and a 2021 neuroscience study disagree. Here's how a super-short afternoon nap makes you sharper and faster.

Somewhere along the career trajectory of most driven and ambitious women, they absorb the same unspoken rule:

If you have time to nap, you must not want it badly enough.

Napping is a waste of time.

You can sleep when you’re older. This is go-time.

In other words, push through that afternoon slump! Load up on the extra coffee! Down that herbal-infused organic energy drink! You’ll be fine.

Now, I trust as you read this, you suspect you can predict my point. Something along the lines of:

Sleep is important. You can’t push yourself to the point of exhaustion and still succeed in the long term. Take care of your body because it’s the only one you’ve got. And so on.

True, true. But that’s not all…

Because the reality is that we all know that logic, are aware of those facts, maybe even pound them into our kids and friends and even coworkers…

But then we say to ourselves, where no one else hears it, “I’ll listen to that logic another day. Not today. Too much to do today.”

And so you push forward and answer the emails, finish the proposal, submit the report, make the grocery list, figure out dinner…

Because if you don’t, who will?

Because it feels like right now, at this particular time in your life, there’s no room for exhaustion.

Because there’s no room for saying no. But someday you will. Definitely.

So I say to you today… what if there’s a better way?

What if the way forward goes against every logical argument in your head and you just, well, go to sleep?

I know, I didn’t believe it either.

But stick with me here. Things are about to get good and calm and productive. Better than you can stand, in fact. I only know this because I’ve already proven my own thinking wrong.

When Your Body Outsmarts You

One of my business mentors likes to say, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” a phrase most commonly attributed to the Navy SEALs.

I struggled with this anti-logic for ages. Because when I move faster, I get more done. I fit more in. I have more wins. …Right?

I thought so, too. But beyond the risk of moving so fast you make mistakes, there’s also the risk of skipping the deep end of thought. Skating through shallow thinking. Missing key connections.

Ironically, in the months I was wrestling with that idea, my body decided it could no longer get through the day without a power nap.

Not that I listened. I piled on the caffeine, showed up for all the meetings (but dozed off), sent emails where the message went awry (because I shipped it half asleep).

Finally, I gave up. I started consciously napping in my chair, which meant popping on noise-canceling headphones, propping my feet up, and allowing the stupor to descend. (Obviously and thank goodness, I work from home.)

It was helpful. It was refreshing, except for the post-nap crick in my neck. I felt more creative and able, even if the doze lasted just five minutes.

So for a while, when I was in the middle of deep creative work and got the urge to sleep, I did. And then I worked better.

But it seemed silly and felt silly, and I didn’t want my kids to catch me dozing in my chair because I’m not an 85-year-old man.

So I upped my game.

Next-Level Napping

Every afternoon, somewhere around the post-lunch slump and after collecting three or four hours of work for the day, I started going up to my bedroom for an intentional nap. Noise-cancelling headphones, check. Sleep mask, check. Binaural beats on, yes. Sleep mode for my phone, absolutely.

I didn’t set an alarm because I wanted to experiment and see how long I could nap uninterrupted.

You know the verdict? 18 minutes on average. That was it.

Someway somehow, my superpower became falling asleep almost instantly and waking up after exactly 18 minutes feeling great.

I’m sure time to fall asleep and time spent asleep is going to range widely for everyone.

But the real win here was that I could go back to my desk and pound out two hours’ worth of work in the hour that remained in my workday.

Steel Balls, Brass Keys, and Explosions of Creativity

Not that I’m the only one who’s had this epiphany. Thomas Edison appreciated a power nap, too.

He’d sit in a chair holding steel balls in his hands with a pie pan on the floor directly underneath them. As he drifted off to sleep, his muscles would relax and he’d drop the balls, which crashed loudly into the pan.

The sudden noise woke him up during what’s called the hypnagogic state, which is the brief transitional phase between wakefulness and deep sleep.

Edison made use of this trick to capture creative thoughts and what he called problem-solving insights before slipping into unconsciousness. And as it turns out, modern sleep studies have shown that this exact sleep stage boosts creative thinking.

In 2021, a team of neuroscientists at the Paris Brain Institute tested this exact technique. They published their findings in the journal Science Advances, describing how they gave 103 participants a series of difficult math problems, each with a hidden shortcut.

Participants who couldn’t figure out the shortcut were given a 20-minute break to relax in a chair holding an object like a plastic bottle in their hand. They were monitored using an EEG that tracked when they entered the N1 sleep stage, which is the hypnagogic state.

The results?

Participants who spent at least 15 seconds in the N1 stage were nearly three times more likely to figure out the hidden math shortcut than those who stayed awake. The only catch was that if the participants fell into a deeper sleep known as the N2 stage, the creative boost completely vanished.

The loud awakening trick is crucial because it catches the brain right at that creative sweet spot.

Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí used a version of this as well, calling it “slumber with a key.” He used it as a physical and mental refresher to spark the bizarre, dreamlike visions that inspired his paintings.

Instead of heavy steel balls he would sit in an armchair holding a heavy metal key pinched between his fingers, with an upside-down brass plate on the floor beneath his hand.

Dalí wrote that the entire nap lasted less than a fraction of a second because the moment the key hit the plate, the clang would shock him awake.

He went on to say that instant micro-napping completely revitalized his physical body and allowed him to capture the vivid, surreal imagery trapped in his subconscious.

The Money Nap

Reading about Edison and Dalí made me question my beautiful bed nap, so I looked into the benefits there.

Turns out that a sleep reset of only 18 minutes means you wake up while you’re still in the lighter stages of sleep and haven’t yet slipped into sleep inertia (which is the dazed, sluggish feeling that leaves people feeling worse after a nap).

It’s why I can get right back to work immediately.

Any nap like this, between 15 and 20 minutes is going to get your brain transitioning into stage 2 of sleep, where it shifts gears and reorganizes data. The outcome is that a short nap can help clear temporary synaptic clutter and strengthen your ability to recall facts and figures.

So it kind of acts like a save button for things you learned earlier in the day. Probably something wise to do right after a training webinar or course.

This kind of brief rest in a comfortable bed also lowers the production of cortisol (yes please).

Now, how do you profit off your nap? By doing your job better and making more money. (Use this argument whenever you try and talk yourself out of a nap.)

Also you feel better.

Also it means overall you move a little slower but I guess that’s where the smoothness comes in, like the Navy SEALs said.

When you’re not jumping around from conclusion to task to to-do list, you can coast through priorities and get there sooner without brain delays along the way.

All to say, I wish you a good nap today. 😊