It’s fifth period biology class, maybe an hour after lunch. The professor is droning on about the Krebs cycle or something—you have no idea. While you’re sitting upright with your eyes slightly open, you slowly drift off into a nap until your head falls forward, waking you suddenly. You look around, dazed, unsure of where you are or what just happened, but before anyone really notices (or lets on), you recover, barely, and are passably engaged with the class at hand.
This happens all too often—students, exhausted from class, homework, and the tensions of being teenagers, find themselves barely awake at their desks. So in 2006, a handful of high schools experimented with a straightforward approach—teachers encouraged students to take a brief after-lunch nap.
Not only that, but the high schools were actually behind the times. That’s because they were in Japan, where sleeping at work is not only accepted but, at times, a sign of one’s dedication and vigor. There’s even a word for it—inemuri, which literally translates as “sleeping while present.”
The theory is pretty straightforward: People who work hard get tired. On-the-job fatigue, therefore, is considered a sign of a productive employee. When you’re tired, sometimes your body overrules your mind, and you fall asleep, even at work. While that’s probably not acceptable in the United States and in other Western cultures, Japan is different—so different, that people will often take fake naps, just so their coworkers think that they’ve worked themselves to exhaustion. (One expert the BBC spoke with likened the practice to a UK worker sending an after-hours e-mail for the primary purpose of demonstrating that he or she is working well into the evening.)
Traditionally, only executives are permitted to practice inemuri, and when they do, they need to appear to be ready to wake at a moment’s notice—sleeping upright, as if paying attention but for the fact that their eyes are closed. However, in recent years, these cultural restrictions have waned. Many retailers now sell desk pillows, explicitly marketed toward those who wish to take a snooze during the workday, and nap salons have emerged across the nation, charging the equivalent of a few dollars for a thirty-minute rental of a daybed within the confines of the spa. Some places also sell coffee designed to kick in with a jolt of caffeine twenty or so minutes after drinking—an office worker imbibes, naps, and is woken up by the drink in time to get back to work.
Most telling is how institutions are adopting the trend. It’s not just schools such as the ones noted previously, nor are these small businesses. In 2006, the Washington Post reported that Toyota’s offices (not dealerships) in Tokyo turned off the lights around lunchtime, and workers took fifteen- to thirty-minute power naps—with the approval of top brass. A company spokesperson told the Post, “When we see people napping during lunchtime, we think, ‘They are getting ready to put 100 percent in during the afternoon.’ Nobody frowns upon it. And no one hesitates to take one during lunchtime either.”
At a young age, Bill Gates was recognized by his school’s administrators for his prowess with computers (and not for good reasons—he and three friends had manipulated the computer lab’s system to obtain extra computing time for themselves). The school asked Gates, still a student, to create a class scheduling system for them, and he agreed. He took advantage of it, though; as he’d later claim in a speech he’d give at his alma mater, “By the time I was done, I found that I had no classes at all on Fridays. And even better, there was a disproportionate number of interesting girls in all my classes.”