An ode to napping

I’m going to let you in on a secret:  I write nearly everything you’ve read in my Substack column right after I’ve gotten up from a nap in the late afternoon.  In fact, I can’t imagine writing this column without taking a nap.  I wake up, and my mind is like one of those friction-powered wind-up cars I had as a kid, the kind you pushed on the floor a few times to load up the rear wheels and get them spinning and then you let it go flying across the living room or down a hallway.  That’s the way it is with me taking a nap. I wake up and walk downstairs and make a cup of coffee and carry it over to my desk at one end of the living room and I’m wound up enough to write another column.

I was trained as as a napper at West Point.  Naps were absolutely essential to get through the schedule they loaded us up with every day.  We called taking a nap “getting rack.”  We’d say after coming back to the barracks after breakfast, “I’m going to get some AMR,” which stood for morning rack.  PMR for afternoon rack, MPR for mid-period rack, ASR for after supper rack.  Lying down and pulling a comforter over you and closing your eyes, you could fall asleep within a minute and get a 10-minute nap and jump up and be out the door to a class in thermodynamics and moments later be standing at a blackboard with a slide rule in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other working a problem that entailed writing equations from as high as you could reach on the blackboard to the eraser tray at the bottom.

Not much has changed when I think about it.  The computer flat screen I’m looking at right now is my blackboard, and sentences are my equations, and I’m still working the problem, refreshed as ever by a nap.  I’m not aware of what napping does to the human brain, and I don’t want to know.  I just take the wind-up and start the column.

In the Army, you learn to nap anywhere – leaning against a tree in the woods or stretched out on a bench in a deuce-and-a-half truck under a canvas top or sitting upright in a chair with your chin resting on your chest.  In one of my classes at West Point, I stood next to a guy at the blackboard who was first in the class in that subject.  He was so smart, he would finish his problem 10 or 15 minutes before everyone else in the class, and because you couldn’t sit down until the professor called “cease work,” he would write his equations leaving a little blank spot in the middle of the blackboard, and the minute he was finished, he would lean forward and rest his forehead against the blank spot and take a nap. The guy was so good at the class – Mechanics of Fluids, if you must know – that the professor couldn’t bring himself to write him up for sleeping in class, otherwise forbidden.

That is professional-level napping.

From the beginning of what I guess we should call my napping career, I learned that ritual helps.  Get yourself comfortable, but not too comfortable.  Because a nap is temporary, no napping under the sheets – just pull a blanket or comforter over you.  Leave as little evidence of the nap as possible – fold up your comforter or blanket behind you as you leave the room.  You don’t want to think of yourself as a slug, sleeping away the day.  You’re a fox, getting a little shuteye before chasing down your next meal. 

There is a certain discipline to napping.  Taking a nap works because it has a beginning, middle, and end.  You are napping, not sleeping.  Napping is temporarily restorative, not restful in the manner of a full night’s sleep.  Keep naps on a tight leash.  Set a clock if you can’t rely on your mental alarm clock.  Don’t let naps get away from you, so you wake up hours later not knowing where you are.  

It helps to give yourself something to do when you wake up from a nap.  Walk the dog or weed out magazines from that stack you’ve been meaning to go through and throw out the ones you’ve read, or make that trip to the store to get something for dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow.  Move.  Do.  Take advantage of the renewal you’ve achieved.

The thing about naps is not to waste them.  Napping is not a luxury.  You should think of taking a nap as something you need, something you’ve earned.  You deserve taking a nap.  Think of it this way:  The world would be a better place if more people took naps in the afternoon, preferably every afternoon.