There are a lot of things I miss about my old lab – the budget, the giant windows, the equipment, the people. But most often I find myself missing my nap room.
So ok, the room wasn’t exactly intended for my blissful naps. It was a windowless room the size of a small closet that served as an outdated computer cemetery /repository and as the home of our fluorescence microscope. I spent the better part of two years in that dark, airless room, staring at glowing neurons till I saw spots and/or became nauseous (have you ever noticed that gliding through multiple fields under the scope gives you motion sickness? It does me).
For a long time, I was the only person ever to use that scope, ever to sit in that room. Every couple of days or so (especially if I was in lab until midnight the night before), I would sneak off to the scope room, take the batteries out of the wall clock to stop the ticking, shut the door, turn out the light, set a timer for 15 minutes, and embark on the most satisfying nap you could imagine. I woke up feeling refreshed and ready for more bench work… or at least ready to remain vertical for a couple more hours. I knew what I needed to achieve maximum productivity, and that was a power nap.
I feel like labs are divided in two – the nap friendly labs and the nap hostile labs. Some have couches or easily locked rooms, while others have bright overhead lights and no place to hide. That must be at some level, up to the PI. I guess some just don’t see the beauty and benefit of napping. Well, they should. I wonder if there is a study out there correlating researcher mid-day napping to publication output. I hypothesize that if every lab invested in a (clean!) couch, productivity would rise dramatically.
I miss my nap room and I miss my productivity boost. Then again, maybe that’s just my excuse for getting sleepy while slogging through my thesis.
Excellent post! I thought I was the only one who thought napping during work hours was a good idea. Sometimes, if I have a really rough night, I may come to the lab and goof off, simply because I just don’t feel “in the mood” to work. However, after a nice nap, I always feel re-motivated. Naps and caffeine are great friends of graduate students.
Isn’t napping what seminars are for? You can sometimes get a whole hour.
The former editor of Nature, John Maddox, was a great power-napper. He had a sofa in his office cubicle, on which he used to get the occasional shut-eye. I think it was all part of his 24-hour-a-day workaholic personality.
That’s fantastic. I am going to pick my advisor at Harvard based on which lab will provide the best opportunity for power naps.
Nuruddeen – Thanks! I had the double whammy of having long days and not being able to drink coffee (it makes my hands shake and mice… well, mice don’t like sharp objects and shaky hands). That nap room was a savior. Anything to get the motivation up again after a really long day in lab.
Bob – Ha! I feel so guilty when I sleep in seminars! I feel awful. I actually pride myself on staying awake through seminars now, even when they are so bad that I want to tear my hair out. Seems self defeating, now that I think about it… Fair point.
Henry – Yea, that’s taking my napping requirement to a whole other level. I don’t think naps can serve as substitutes for leaving the lab, though I have heard about people using them as such. You can usually tell who they are by the rumpled clothing and smell of defeat surrounding them.
Naveen – Awesone! Good luck. It’s a fair question to ask the students/post-docs when the PI walks out of the room. Maybe best not to ask the PI directly. Never know with those people :) (Kidding about that last part. Mostly).
Anna,
There was a nap room in my former lab, not only for napping, but also for doing nap research! The researcher was Sara Mednick (google her), and the nappers were the rest of the lab!
Anna – Personally, I use and abuse that unwritten ‘entitlement’, due any postdoc on an unstipulated hours contract, to my favourite compound word: flexi-time. That and regular caffeine (without which, conversely, I can struggle to function). Things have brightened here somewhat: there’s a new coffee bar in the hospital foyer, which, although bemusedly requiring a chain of three uniformed people to relay an order for Americano and muffin costing the best part of a fiver, serves to break up tissue culture tedium and get me out of the building (at least for a while).
I sympathize with the need to nap. I remember once getting a comment from a tech who passed me in the hall, about my raccoon eyes: I had fallen asleep for 10 minutes or so /on/ the fluorescent scope, and had bright red rings around my eyes, particularly at the bridge of my nose. Anyhow, sometime in your career, try to get yourself an office or a lab or another fluorescence closet where you can close the door. Then you can do your power naps and no one the wiser – unless you get keyprints on your cheek.