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Take more naps, because science

Sleeping on the job doesn’t make you lazy, just smart.

Jessica Wildfire
6 min readJul 30, 2018
Photo by Boba Jovanovic on Unsplash

Remember nap time, back in grade school? Your teachers used to make you sleep for half an hour, after lunch. Maybe you hated it as much as I did, and got in trouble for talking. Now, you’re all grown up. You have a job, which often feels too much like school. There’s just one big difference. If you take a nap now, you might get fired.

We’ve all seen it happen. A couple of my friends lost their jobs in college because they closed their eyes for a few minutes.

Their boss caught them.

It almost happened to me. My manager showed mercy, though. Sent me home without pay. What a nice guy.

For a long time, work culture convinced us that sleeping on the job was lazy. In fact, it was the hallmark of lackluster motivation.

Plenty of supervisors blow past the obvious — that their employees aren’t getting enough sleep. Instead, they assume drowsiness means someone stayed out partying all last night, or watching Netflix.

The truth is more complicated. When you have two jobs and three kids, you’re going to feel tired at work. More employers should let us take a nap. Why? Because science. And we should always listen to science.

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