Page 61 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

26 YOU SNOOZE…YOU WIN!

‘Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead’, say clubbers, rad dudes and
candle-burners generally, but few of them realise that Benjamin
Franklin beat them to it by more than a couple of centuries when he
said ‘there will be sleeping enough in the grave’.

However, Franklin probably didn’t mean that it was cool to fuel your all-
nighters with Red Bull and vodka—but he did have a horror of wasted time
and argued strongly that ‘how much more than is necessary do we spend in
sleep! Forgetting that the sleeping fox catches no poultry’.

DEFINING IDEA…
My sense is that planned, permitted, endorsed napping by
management is still rare.
~ DAVID DINGES, SLEEP RESEARCHER

Modern foxes may be interested to know that research suggests that while
the brain definitely needs some occasional down time, it almost certainly
doesn’t require ten hours of one-to-one with the duvet. In actual fact short
‘power naps’ of twenty or thirty minutes are probably all you need to
refresh the grey matter and power up your productivity accordingly. NASA
researchers have found that a thirty-minute power nap resulted in better
scores from volunteers taking IQ tests as a gauge of mental agility. The
results were quite marked—their scores were up to 40% better, in fact.

Power-napping proponents also point to lower stress rates and incidence of
heart disease amongst those who regularly practise the art. None of this will
surprise people who come from Latin cultures, for whom the siesta has long
been seen as an essential part of the daily routine. The benefits of a siesta
will also be immediately apparent to anyone who has had to present
something important—or indeed, anything—to that first meeting after lunch.

All of this should not be seen as an excuse for the chronically lazy among
us, however, as most research suggests that there is an upper limit to the