Coffee Naps Better For Alertness Than Coffee Or Naps Alone

An anonymous reader writes: Caffeine is a staple of most workplaces — it's rare to find an office without a coffee pot or a fridge full of soda. It's necessary (or at least feels like it's necessary) because many workers have a hard time staying awake while sitting at a desk for hours at a time, and the alternative — naps — aren't usually allowed. But new research shows it might be more efficient for employers to encourage brief "coffee naps," which are more effective at returning people to an alert state than either caffeine or naps alone. A "coffee nap" is when you drink a cup of coffee, and then take a sub-20-minute nap immediately afterward. This works because caffeine takes about 20 minutes to get into your bloodstream, and a 20-minute nap clears adenosine from your brain without putting you into deeper stages of sleep. In multiple studies, tired participants who took coffee naps made fewer mistakes in a driving simulator after they awoke than the people who drank coffee without a nap or slept without ingesting caffeine.

Comments

Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[i kan reed]

Every metric that says not doing work at certain times can be good for your work overall can and will be overlooked by the kind of people who want you working 60 hour weeks. They want to look good for their boss, and butts in seats are the best way to do that.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[TWX]

I can attest to this. When I was hourly at a place where they weren't allowed to send us home early, they would find all manner of useless busywork for us to do if they caught us done without more work to do. It became an arms race, between trying to not get caught and trying to catch those not working.

And for those that want to argue that it's the employer's time, to use the employees how they see fit, one of the fastest ways to demoralize a technical worker is to make him do manual labor that doesn't even serve a purpose; most of us got into technical fields to avoid doing manual labor in the first place, let alone that which doesn't make a positive contribution.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[i kan reed]

I don't know if most of us got into tech to avoid manual labor. I personally got in it because I like the idea of solving problems, rather than taking care of them for a short while.

I'd appreciate more physical activity at work, 40 hours a week of physical idleness(on top of sleeping) is not what the human body evolved for.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[poetmatt]

Of course an employer can do what they want which includes busywork, but that doesn't mean the employer isn't a complete failure when it comes to defining the scope of a job position. Most employers are too lazy to do this well.

Any employer who can't accept that you won't be busy every second of the day is not an employer worth working for in any country in the world.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[jon3k]

Depends on the employer. Maybe if you have a bunch of $11/hour monkeys working for you all they care about are butts in seats. My upper management wants to see project deadlines hit. They don't care what or how we get it done.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[TWX]

"Go take these old PCs we pulled from the field, upgrade the RAM, and reimage them so they could be redeployed at some point."

"Go take these old PCs that are in the redeployment pool and cannibalize them."

"Go take these cannibalized PCs and load them into this modular shipping container."

"Go unload this modular shipping container of old cannibalized PCs and load them in this trailer."

"Go unload this trailer of old cannibalized PCs and load them onto these pallets."

"Go break-down these pallets of old cannibalized PCs and load them into this modular shipping container."

It was like Cool Hand Luke without the eggs.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[bondsbw]

There's also the question of whose dime this caffeine nap is on: the employee, or the employer.

Each has an opinion and it's probably not the same opinion.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[i kan reed]

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to suggest I wasn't sympathetic with your plight. Sorry. Busywork does actually suck. Just that a bit of physical labor as part of my work day wouldn't be unwelcome.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[Infiniti2000]

When my engineers are low on actual tasks, I encourage them to learn. Go read up on some new technology, play around with that game engine, read some technology magazines or books, etc. That increased knowledge is incredibly useful to the company in the long run, it makes for happier employees, and they are even more marketable. Sounds counterproductive, but I prefer more marketable employees because it means not only do I have a strong team, but now the company is far more appealing to other marketable employees when I have an opening.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[TWX]

I made that argument more times than I could keep track of.

Part of the problem was that immediate supervisory-types could only barely do their own jobs, and saw just about everyone underneath that was more capable as a threat, so they actively discouraged us to play and learn.

They even got mad when I took an ancient box and loaded Linux on it to play. It was a friggin' Microchannel box it was so old, and they still panicked because it wasn't 'standard'. Nevermind that the IT department should be the one place in the entire organization that isn't standard, since it should be testing-out new devices to determine if they'll be widely deployed.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[ShanghaiBill]

Welcome to the life of an active duty military member

Indeed. Nobody does busywork as well as the US military. When I was a private, I was once give the task of straightening out staples so they could be reused.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[bill_mcgonigle]

I personally got in it because I like the idea of solving problems, rather than taking care of them for a short while.

Just don't mistake any of the trades for not being problem-solving professions. Laying out a plumbing stack, electrical plan, etc. and making it work seamlessly (err... perfectly), or welding together a skyscraper are very valid and worthy problem solving engagements. Same with shoeing a horse from rods of iron. You just get to move more in these jobs.

I'd love to hear from somebody who feels that writing a finance report module is more worthy an endeavour than building a house for a family. I'm not even confident that it could be proven to be a better productivity enhancer on a macro level as your report module will be thrown away in a few years, but that house will be there for a century.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[FatdogHaiku]

...And for those that want to argue that it's the employer's time, to use the employees how they see fit, one of the fastest ways to demoralize a technical worker is to make him do manual labor that doesn't even serve a purpose; most of us got into technical fields to avoid doing manual labor in the first place, let alone that which doesn't make a positive contribution.

One of the scariest things to see is a programmer walking towards the servers with a screwdriver...

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[TWX]

No. If anything I left out a few steps, like going through and reimaging the same enqueued loaner stock two or three times over the course of six months, even though the new image being put down was the same as the old one, and a few instances where cannibalized machines were un-cannibalized before sitting a few months and being re-cannibalized again.

Re:Employers don't want employees who LOOK lazy.

[TWX]

Unless you're now the second-or-third-generation of enlistee that's been given the task, where the previous "generations" now assume that it's normal to do that to someone instead of using it as a character test.

IE, by failing the character test and still managing to become sergeants, they pass the trait on in a natural-selection sort of way.

Anecdotal verification

[kheldan]

I've done this for years, and didn't even know it was a thing. Seems to work.

Re:Anecdotal verification

[Will.Woodhull]

I've done this for years, and didn't even know it was a thing. Seems to work.

Works for me too, especially when bumping into dead ends doing creative work.

I'm a writer; I can put in a solid day's work on the proofreading and minor editing/revision aspects, but sometimes spend days or weeks trying to find a good point of view for a scene, or effective way to present character development. Best thing when realizing I've just spent half a day writing crap: have a cup of coffee and nap 15 minutes.

Re:Anecdotal verification

[LocutusMIT]

Was it drink coffee, set 20 minute alarm, nap, jump to work like in the story?

I'm not the GP, but I do this on long drives if I start feeling a bit bleary. I'll pull into a rest area, drink a bit of something caffeinated (maybe a couple of good pulls on a bottle of Dr Pepper or Moxie), and put my seat all the way back. No alarm needed, as the caffeine slowly takes effect and wakes me up in about 15 to 20 minutes.

It leaves me feeling awake and alert again, and I'll repeat the process every couple of hours.

Note that I broke my caffeine addiction in college when it started giving me miserable headaches, and I rarely consume anything caffeinated today, so a little bit goes a long way for me. If you drink caffeine regularly, you may need more than I do to make this work.

Re:Unless...

[i kan reed]

Naps of this sort aren't about "falling asleep" though.

I've actually done this with 5 hour energy drinks.

[Chas]

It works surprisingly well.

Re:Unless...

[NeoMorphy]

You could try doing it during a meeting.

Bring a cup of coffee and a pair of those fake awake eyes specs and hope you don't snore.

Ad coffee

[confused one]

What we need is a brand of coffee which contains an additive to help flush adenosine. Then we can get more productivity from our slav... *cough* excuse me, umm, happy employees.

Shape up, science!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This is supposed to be the future! Why do I need 'sleep' to clear this adenosine from my brain when swarms of nanites in my bloodstream could be doing it instead? So much for progress.

Drop Caffeine Altogether

[MyLongNickName]

About ten years ago, I cut out caffeine altogether. The first two weeks off of it was really tough. I slept a lot and when I was awake I didn't feel awake.

Now, I'm more alert than I was when I was caffeinated and when I hit the pillow at night, 9 times out of 10 I am out within five minutes. I wake up without an alarm clock and have no more than a minute or two of grogginess when I get up.

I was probably a harder core caffeine user than most, and with my personality, dialing it back wouldn't work -- it is either consume a lot or none at all.

Overall, it was the best health choice I've made for myself.

Re:Drop Caffeine Altogether

[AthanasiusKircher]

About ten years ago, I cut out caffeine altogether.

Yes, I did that too out of necessity about 5 years ago. Not that I was ever actually "addicted" like many people -- I would rarely have coffee more than a few times per week, though I used to brew a LOT of my own tea and iced tea.

But at some point my body seemed to become hypersensitive to it. Now, if I have a cup of coffee after 2pm, it will likely keep me awake until the middle of the night. So I just had to move to decaf tea and coffee.

Now, I'm more alert than I was when I was caffeinated

This is the thing about studies like this. Many of these studies are rather small (and I didn't read the full studies), but I really hope they'd measure the differences between those who are heavily addicted to caffeine vs. "a cup or two per day" vs. "rarely consume caffeine or never."

Especially when you have other studies like this one, which suggests that caffeine addicts actually normally are functioning on a lower level than non-addicts, and the best they can hope for is a return to "baseline" by drinking more caffeine.

If there were differences in the napping between groups, it would be very relevant for recommendations. The danger of such studies without these kinds of nuances is you get people thinking, "I just need to drink even more coffee! And take naps!" when a more realistic recommendation would perhaps be to stop the addiction, live most of your life at a higher functioning level overall, and when you're really tired and need it, do the "caffeine nap" trick only occasionally.

Re:Good way to make yourself ill

[Will.Woodhull]

Yeah, because what was good enough for the Roman slaves and medieval serfs is obviously the best life style for everybody.

Look to our roots in hunting/gathering, and you find there was no set pattern for sleep. When picking berries, you slept in the shade when it was too hot or at camp when it was too dark; otherwise you picked while watching the sunrise and picked while watching the sun set. When the smelt were running, you scooped up fish in the moonlight, cleaned fish as the sun rose, gathered wood and greenery for the smoking fires in the morning, and took long siestas during the heat of the day.

Our ancestors may have averaged 8 or 10 hours of sleep in a day, but for the most part it was in bits and pieces. Mostly no more than 4-6 hours at any one time, with the rest in siestas or naps as tasks allowed.

Re:Good way to make yourself ill

[pla]

Maybe people should just sleep 8 hours a night like they're supposed to.

We don't naturally sleep 8 hours a night. We naturally sleep for two blocks of 3-4 hours per day, which the lifestyle requirements of the modern world have forced to occur in a more-or-less continuous 7-8 hour block.

Pre-industrially, those two blocks would have an hour or two of waking time between them; modern research (mostly military) has found that splitting them apart further allows people to go with as little as 4-5 hours of sleep per 24 hour period with only minimal impact on performance.

20 minute nap?

[LordNimon]

It takes me 20 minutes to fall asleep normally, even when I haven't had any caffeine. Not only that, but I would need to take my contact lenses out first.

Re:20 minute nap?

[brunes69]

I came here to say the same thing. I find it hard to believe most people can just nap on a dime. In fact I can't sleep unless I am actually tired, I can't just "nap" at will.

this will never work in IT

[Applehu Akbar]

Ask about taking coffee naps, or even the more traditional after-lunch kind, and your employer will suspect you of being over forty.

Re:I've actually done this with 5 hour energy drin

[swv3752]

www.5hourenergy.com/healthfacts.asp

AC is full of crap. There is no sugar; sucralose is used for a sweetener. One could argue that sucralose and preservatives are toxic, but everything else is mostly vitamins, amino acids and caffeine. Seems to be a better option than chugging a soda or Red Bull.

Stand-up workstations are better than caffeine

[jtnix]

I would argue that employers are definitely interested in increased productivity from employees, but they will certainly settle for the appearance of productivity.

At the risk of going off-topic, a twice-a-day caffeine nap at work is not going to improve productivity nearly as much as a stand-up work station will. Not to mention that staying in a sedentary, sitting position 8+ hours a day is incredibly unhealthy and unnatural. Blast from the past from Mashable: http://mashable.com/2011/05/09...

Re:Good way to make yourself ill

[AthanasiusKircher]

Pre-industrially, those two blocks would have an hour or two of waking time between them

Indeed -- it was basically forgotten for about a century, but recently historians have been finding references EVERYWHERE to "first sleep" (or "early slumber" or "beauty sleep") and "second sleep" in many cultures around the world.

The first descriptions of "insomnia" come up only in the 19th century, just about the same time that the two sleep blocks really started to disappear.

And we should not forget the role of coffee in this transition. (From the link above:)

[A researcher] attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night.

Coffee may not just ruin your sleep sometimes if you drink too much -- it may have played a major role in divorcing our entire species from its most natural sleep patterns and convincing everyone that a solid 8-hour block is most "normal."