Forty winks in the wild

I don’t like Wednesdays. If the working week is like a giant lake, then reaching Wednesday is like swimming to the midpoint: Thursday and Friday still loom ahead of you in the watery distance while Monday and Tuesday have already sapped most of the energy you built up during that fabulous weekend you left back on the shore.

The solution to the midweek energy slump? An afternoon nap! And like so many solutions to life’s problems, this one comes to us from nature.

Humans are monophasic sleepers (and have been since some point between 70,000-40,000 BC) – once we leave the naps of infancy behind, our sleep is usually concentrated into one nocturnal period. But the majority of the planet’s non-human mammals are polyphasic sleepers: they snooze often throughout their day.

Take many of the animals in one of Earth-Touch’s favourite filming locations, the Okavango: midday slumbers are essential here to conserve energy during the day’s hottest period. Baboons (the poster children for nap benefits, seen here happily dozing) forage for a few hours in the morning and then take time out when the heat intensifies. (Napping is the norm for many non-mammals, too. My personal micro-napping hero is the Swainson’s thrush, a migratory bird that takes hundreds of daytime naps by closing its eyes – or just one! – for only a few seconds.)

Stacks of sleep studies have shown that a carefully timed siesta can ease stress and improve your mood, memory, alertness and even your health. Sounds like the perfect solution to the Wednesday funk (in fact, you might like to try it on other days as well).

Go on. Catch some Zs. I won’t tell the boss.