While many people get plenty of restful sleep, most people don’t allow themselves enough time to recharge for the next day.
With something so coveted as sleep, why don’t we carve out more time for it?
The modern world demands much of our waking hours, and constant attention to absorb information. But believe it or not, there was a time in history when taking an afternoon nap was just common practice.
So why should you, as a hard-working entrepreneur, take a nap when you’re working from home?
Save money. Grow online.
Learn what our 360° Marketing Program can do for your company to help you grow your business online!
Boost Your Productivity
When you’re working from home, pushing yourself to get work done requires a lot of mental effort, and perhaps even physical exertion depending on what your business is.
For instance, if you make hand-made crafts and sell them online, you’re spending time actually creating your products as well as taking pictures of them and posting each product online.
As your sales increase, it demands more and more of your attention and effort. This saps your energy, and your work pace slows down. No doubt, this will affect your sales if you don’t keep up.
Taking a nap for just 20 minutes – usually dubbed a “cat nap” – is thought to be the ideal timeframe for a quick recharge to get you back on track and keep your pace.
Think about it: even NASCAR drivers have to have a pit stop in the middle of a race, and sometimes a few of them. If they drove without making sure their tires were optimized, the driver was hydrated, and whatever else they do in the pit, the driver wouldn’t be able to keep up with the other racers and would inevitably destroy his car.
Relieve Work & Personal Stress
One of the best ways to get our minds off of the things that are bothering us is to simply reboot the system. Namely, taking a nap!
Nothing is worth stressing over, as just about everything in life has a possible solution. However, if you haven’t exactly mastered the art of meditation and breathing, taking a nap is kind of like a cheater’s method to relieving stress.
Refresh Your Focus
As you work on your product or service, it’s common to lose focus as you go through the motions needed to make things happen in your business.
This is especially the case when you’re living the laptop lifestyle, and doing everything for your business on a computer. You might forget to blink, causing your eyes to become heavy and hurt.
You could experience brain fog, which is also common especially around the afternoon.
When you take a nap, you’re giving your brain a break. It’s a muscle just like any other…you know, except for the vast potential intelligence held by those billions of neurons and stuff.
Take the hint – take a nap and you’ll get your focus back.
Improve Your Overall Health
When you sleep, your conscious ego mind shuts down. This allows unimpeded subconscious processes to take place.
Your headaches will resolve themselves and blood pressure should drop (except for in existing health conditions that prevent this).
More importantly, establishing a regular napping schedule (if possible) helps you to sleep better at night because your body isn’t trying to cram all of that healing into just one session.
Be Better At Business
Overall, learning how to take naps when you work from home is essential to your overall success. In England, for instance, it was common for “tea time” to include socializing or napping before continuing on with your day. Shops would close for an hour or two until their owners returned, and businesses stopped operations at the same time every day.
Today, we live in a “get as much stuff done as you can” world, and productivity has been elevated to a human virtue.
Productivity is not a virtue, just so you know. It’s a vague adjective of someone’s work effort (i.e., “Mary was very productive today, she looked tired at the end of the day!”) and it shows.
When you establish napping into your lifestyle, you’re making a statement to the business world:
I’m going to be productive, but not at the expense of my health.
This statement sure says a lot about how we live our lives on a daily basis. Besides, you’re already working from home…
…so why not take a nap?
