Wake Me When It Cools Off

A modest proposal to bring the siesta back

My wrists are sizzling. Yes, it’s an unfortunate fact of being a self-employed writer/editor that I end up spending quite a few hot summer afternoons tethered to a laptop with my wrists resting right over the heat-generating battery. There’s no better way to add 10 degrees to your own personal “heat index.” And I wasn’t a fan of the heat to begin with.

Last time I complained about this I got various practical suggestions, including attaching a separate USB keyboard, and my cousin even gave me a cool USB-powered mini fan. These are good ideas, but I was thinking of something a little more radical.

Like a siesta.

I mean, just because it’s only hot here for part of the year doesn’t mean we can’t learn from places where it’s hot all the damn time, right? And they knock off and sleep when it gets too hot.

There’s plenty of information out there about people who want to bring back or expand the siesta. Apparently all aside from the heat thing, an afternoon nap is both natural and good for you. Natural, as in we generally get sleepy twice a day, with the first time being about eight hours after we get up. And good for you as in a fairly large, well-controlled study from Greece found that taking a regular afternoon nap reduced your risk of dying from heart disease by 34 percent. Israeli researchers found it also improves your memory. Combine that with how it just makes you feel better and skip that afternoon period of being zoned out and unfocused, and you get efforts like the U.K.’s National Siesta Day (second annual one coming up on June 25) and our own National Napping Day (it was March 10, after we lost an hour to daylight saving). Both support proud napping and encourage employers to allow their employees to grab a regular 40 winks after lunch.

That’s all well and good. But it’s all about sleeping for 10 to 20 minutes. A catnap. The countries that basically shut down for two-hour siestas spend much of it eating and socializing around their brief snooze. Sounds great, but it’s hardly something that’s going to give me a chance of actually missing the daily high temperature mark (which around here is between 3 and 6 PM anyway, not over lunchtime). If I’m trying to sleep away the hot hours so I can get up earlier or stay up later to do computer work during the cooler times, 10 minutes won’t suffice.

If I’m going for a nap longer than 30 minutes though, it seems I need to be in for at about an hour and a half, the length of a normal sleep cycle. After 30 minutes (or sooner if you’re sleep deprived), you enter deep sleep, and it’s trying to wake up from the middle of that that makes you feel groggy and less rested. That’s why most nappers stick with the shorter end (especially since 10 minutes is usually enough to make you feel refreshed and refocused). If I want to nap long enough to both cut down my nighttime sleep and stop thinking about the heat for an appreciable amount of time, it looks I’ve got to commit to going until REM sleep. That’s quite a surgery to my schedule.

So will a siesta work as a beat-the-heat strategy? It does evoke pleasant memories of dozing off on lazy summer afternoons, giving in to the “it’s too hot to move” feeling, letting the muscles that want to melt just do so, swinging in a hammock in the breeze by the sparkling sand turquoise water. Oh wait, that one wasn’t a memory, that was a commercial. Oh well.

The problem is, the thought of sleeping in the heat also evokes memories of it being impossible to fall asleep even at night on the hottest days—positioning myself carefully in front of the fan, draping wet, cold washcloths over my extremities, sticking to the sheets. I want to try that twice a day?

Well maybe I do. Maybe with more practice I’ll get better at it. Because of course the thing about something like a siesta is that it’s not about pretending it’s not hot out. It’s not about fighting summer. It’s about acting like it is summer. Slowing down, changing schedule, ad apting. It’s exactly what our uniform 9-to-5 world doesn’t do well. But perhaps this year I’ll give it a try.

If you call and I don’t answer, it just might be siesta time.

—Miriam Axel-Lute

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