It Changes Everything

Do you want to know what changes everything? What can change your day, your week, your whole year? Something that, if you started with it, just about everything else falls into place?

Naps.

That's right, taking a nap.

I had the good fortune to be able to take naps this year. Because I had the varied schedule of a student, I could nap an hour in the afternoon here and there, or sometimes in the late morning, or right after dinner (since I was going to go to bed at 2 am anyway). I would take a nap at the library, take a nap in my own bed, take a on the couch downstairs . . . I napped with the best of them.

I cannot tell you how great it is. When you nap your mood improves, your health improves, your cognition improves. You have more energy and you're more alert and you're more present and you're more alive. I'm sure it adds years to your life.

But this shouldn't surprise us: if your body says it's tired, it knows what it needs, so you should go to sleep. Pretty simple.

If you start with naps, everything else can fall into place. True for an individual, true for a society.

Napping is so great and so essential, that I think it's a crime if you can't do it. If your culture has constructed itself so that it's impossible to take naps whenever you want, it's a culture that's gone badly off the rails.

So here is my new gauge of the worthiness of a society: how much napping can you do?

And I'm not really joking. If your culture has ample napping time, it's a culture that honors biorhythms, honors health, and honors individuality. Do you know who does all the napping they ever need? Hunter-gatherers . . . both stone age hunter-gatherers and modern hunter-gatherers. Consider this passage about an aboriginal group in Australia:

"Apart from the time spent in general social intercourse, chatting, gossiping, and so on, some hours of the daylight were also spent resting and sleeping. If the men were in camp, they usually slept after lunch from an hour to an hour and a half, sometimes even more. After returning from fishing or hunting they usually had a sleep . . . . The women, when out collecting in the forest, appeared to rest more frequently than the men. If in camp all day, they also slept at odd times, sometimes for long periods."

That's right, by my formula, the aborigines are more advanced than we are. They have lots of napping opportunities. We have almost none. And we think that's progress.