Emerson Kimura writes:
Have you seen this?
He’s pointing to an article, “The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep among the Urban Poor,” by Pedro Bessone et al., which begins as follows:
The urban poor in developing countries face challenging living environments, which may interfere with good sleep. Using actigraphy to measure sleep objectively, we find that low-income adults in Chennai, India sleep only 5.5 hours per night on average despite spending 8 hours in bed. Their sleep is highly interrupted, with sleep efficiency—sleep per time in bed—comparable to those with disorders such as sleep apnea or insomnia. A randomized three-week treatment providing information, encouragement, and improvements to home sleep environments increased sleep duration by 27 minutes per night by inducing more time in bed. Contrary to expert predictions and a large body of sleep research, increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply. In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations, with significant increases in productivity, psychological well-being, and cognition, but a decrease in work time.
I added the emphasis above. Kumura writes:
The references include Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. I wonder what he thinks about it.
I’m guessing that the answer is that we’ll never find out what he thinks about it.
In any case, I sent the above to Alexey Guzey, who said:
This study is great but do note that the abstract is a bit misleading. The authors are trying to push the narrative of increasing night sleep not doing much but naps being good, however they fail to report that output did not change change for naps (arguable, this is the thing we care most about in terms of “Economic consequences”):
For about the last ten years that I was at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory I had a couch in my office. Most days, when I started to get drowsy around 2:30 pm, I would get on the couch for a 20- to 30-minute nap. Anything longer and I’d wake up groggy, but at 20-30 minutes I would get up refreshed and ready to go. At 2:30 I only had about 3 hours left in my workday anyway, so it’s entirely possible that my increased productivity per hour did not make up for the lost half hour of work. But I don’t think it hurt, either, and it certainly made me happier.
The funny thing was, many of my colleagues expressed envy about the couch and fully endorsed my napping habit. Nobody, including my supervisor and other higher-ups, expressed any disapproval or any sense that I was shirking. Everyone got it. But nobody else did it! If someone said “oh, man, that’s a great idea, I often feel low-energy and have trouble focusing and I sometimes even fall asleep with my head on the desk” I would say “get a couch and take a nap! Or feel free to come use mine, as long as I’m not on it!” but nobody ever did either of these.
I work remotely, and probably take a nap like this on more than half of my days. 100% agree that it makes me feel much more alert and productive, when otherwise I’d be just slogging through the end of the day, and certainly makes me happier. And, similarly, any time I’ve ever talked with anyone about this they’ve been nothing but supportive of the idea.
But I still find it a little awkward, like it’s inappropriate somehow. Some kind of ambient social pressure maybe, even if it’s just imagined? I’m not surprised that no one ever followed your suggestions. When the costs and benefits are so ambiguous seems like we are prone to just falling back on convention.
You don’t even need a couch. I had a rather wide bookcase in my office. I pulled it out from the wall that my desk faced, leaving enough space behind it to put up a folding cot behind it. I added a small pillow, and there was my nap space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk7oNNT7s14
No change in output with improved psychological wellbeing sounds like a net gain to me. Not everything is dollars and cents.
Exactly. From an economist view point, you want to maximize utility. Getting paid basically the same while working less (the referenced “decrease in work time”) and having greater measured well-being is exactly what an economist would call a win!
Sleeping an extra half hour is certainly nice, but they were still only getting 6 hours of sleep. I’m not surprised at the lack of a big benefit.