Napping at Work Movement Boosted by Eye-Opening Study

Published at 2:01 am, February 11, 2015

EastIdahoNews.com Staff

BONNINSTUDIO/iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — There’s new science out attempting to debunk the commonly held workplace belief that if you snooze, you lose.

Researchers in France studying a small group of young, healthy men found that when the men experienced a night of sleep deprivation — just two hours of sleep were allowed — the group showed a significant increase in their stress-hormone levels the next day.

After the men were allowed to take two 30-minute naps, however, their hormone levels decreased to where they would be after a full eight-hour night of sleep.

The study’s findings were published in Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention recommend that adults get an average of seven to eight hours of sleep a night. But according to the National Institutes of Health, 40 percent of American adults are sleep-deprived.

Companies have been splurging on sleep pods because previous studies have found that sleep deprivation can decrease decision-making, reaction time and memory by as much as 50 percent.

MetroNaps, which produces the pods, said it had found people who took a 20-minute nap experienced a 30 percent boost in alertness, making them more productive.

Google, NASA and the Huffington Post are among the employers encouraging their employees to catch some Zs in sleep pods and the tiny spheres continue to grow in popularity.

“I’ve seen so many people who come up to me and say, ‘I’ve had like a second day given to me because I had a 20-minute nap,’” said Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post.

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