Cut From Steel

He napped holding a key over a metal plate

Salvador Dalí described a method he called slumber with a key in his 1948 book, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship.

Dalí would sit upright in a chair with a heavy key held loosely between finger and thumb, and an upturned metal plate on the floor directly beneath his hand.

He let himself drift off in the chair. At the moment sleep properly took him, his fingers relaxed, the key dropped, and the clatter of metal on metal brought him straight back. The whole business lasted a matter of seconds.

Dalí insisted the point was the boundary rather than the sleep. He wanted the few seconds on the edge of it, and he claimed that this was enough rest to carry him through an afternoon's work.

I am not going to pretend Dalí was running a controlled experiment, because he was a showman who claimed a great many other things besides. What he had stumbled into is real enough all the same, and every airline pilot and shift nurse in the world has since been taught a version of it.

The difference between a short nap and a long one is not a difference of degree. Dalí guarded the second half of his day by keeping the nap too short to become sleep. Your afternoon has exactly the same problem, and you have been solving it with coffee.

You wake from the Sunday nap worse than you went in

You sat down after lunch, you were gone for ninety minutes, and you came round with a thick head and a foul mood. Then you lay awake at eleven wondering what was wrong with you.

I want to separate two completely different things that both get called a nap. Mayo Clinic puts the useful one at 20 to 30 minutes and advises against making a habit of anything longer than half an hour.

You have been taking the wrong one, most Sundays, for about fifteen years.

It's not age. It's these three.

I will give you three things Mayo Clinic says about napping, and one alarm to set this afternoon.

01 / Twenty To Thirty Minutes

Mayo Clinic calls a 20 to 30 minute nap ideal and advises against regularly snoozing longer than 30 minutes. Short enough, and you get your alertness back for the price of half an hour. Long enough, and you surface out of deep sleep instead, which is an entirely different and considerably worse experience.

02 / The Grogginess Has A Name

That heavy, useless feeling on waking is called sleep inertia, and Mayo Clinic notes it often goes away within about 35 minutes. So the long Sunday nap costs you more than half an hour of being no use to anybody, stacked on top of the ninety minutes you were already unconscious for.

03 / Three O'Clock Is The Line

Mayo Clinic says napping after 3pm can make it harder to sleep soundly at night, and that long or frequent naps might interfere with night-time sleep generally. Research has also linked habitual naps of over an hour a day with higher rates of high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, though a long daily nap may be a signal of poor health as much as a cause of it.

Take it back today

I owe you an important distinction. If you are sleeping badly at night, a nap is a patch rather than a repair, and Mayo Clinic notes that napping can make an existing sleep problem worse rather than better. Fix the nights first and the afternoons usually follow on their own.

You should also be honest with yourself about why the nap is there at all. A man who needs ninety minutes every Sunday is very often a man running a sleep debt from Monday to Friday, and no single afternoon has ever settled that account.

I want you to try the short version today. Set an alarm for 25 minutes, lie down before three o'clock, and get up when it sounds regardless of how you feel about it. Then make a note of what time you fall asleep tonight.

You have been treating the long nap as a reward and paying the bill at eleven o'clock. Twenty-five minutes, before three, with the alarm set. Tonight will tell you whether I am right.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits for the second half of the day:

Sunday money is for the corner of the house you actually sit in.

01 / Chair · One good armchair and a floor lamp

Every man over 45 should have one chair in the house that is his, positioned where the light is right, with a lamp beside it that points at the page rather than at the ceiling. Buy the chair secondhand if you have to and spend the difference on the lamp. A reading corner is the cheapest room upgrade there is and the one you will use every single day.

02 / Watch · Longines Spirit

Forty millimetres, chronometer-certified, and built on Longines' aviation history rather than on a marketing department's idea of it. The dial is busy in the way pilots' watches are supposed to be busy, and the movement is properly regulated for the money. It is the sensible man's alternative to spending three times as much for the same accuracy.

03 / Sound · A pair of open-back headphones

Something like a Sennheiser HD 650 in the armchair, with a small amplifier to drive them properly. Open-back means the sound has somewhere to go, so a record stops feeling like it is happening inside your skull and starts feeling like it is happening in a room. You will not wear them on a train. Two hours on a Sunday in that chair and you will forget what time it is.