I hope this puts you to sleep

By ROY McGREGOR
TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL
Don't be shy about nodding off.
I'll understand; you're only making sure you're going to be as alert as possible for that pivotal, wind-up paragraph at the end.
Certainly I intend to take a quick nap between first draft and final polish. Otherwise, I risk turning in a column that just isn't quite as sharp as it needs to be.
A short nap, however, and my own IQ has been known to double.
According to the most recent issue of Nature Neuroscience, Harvard researchers are now able to confirm what most of us have known since we were still in diapers: A good nap cures almost everything.
What the scientists discovered is that even a few winks -- so long as the nap involves a bit of rapid-eye-movement and, usually, dreams -- help the mind concentrate once the subject gets back to work.
They split the experiment into two groups, one allowed a nap after some morning testing, the other denied a nap, and when both groups were retested in the evening, the non-nappers seemed a tad slower, while the nappers actually improved.
Admittedly, some of us who have sworn all our lives by the siesta wonder why an experiment was even necessary.
Corporate movement
But apparently there is even a small movement in corporate North America to accept that dozing off on the job is not necessarily a firing offense.
Camille Anthony, the Boston co-author of "The Art of Napping," has said it's absurd to regard the worker who fades away for a half-hour each day as a laggard who is simply wasting the company's time.
"You are actually enhancing your employer's business," she argues.
According to the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, 19 percent of adults have a daily nap, but far more would take one if they thought they could get away with it.
One-third of all adults say they would nap at work if napping were allowed, and 27 percent claim they are sleepy, and therefore unproductive, at work two or more days of every week.
The foundation has concluded, therefore, that yawning and sleepiness on the job interfere with the daily output of 51 percent of the work force.
Perhaps in reaction to such findings, some businesses in Canada and the United States have added "nap rooms" to their operations, complete with replacement linens so each napper can have fresh sheets.
As someone who works at home or on the road, however, I feel obliged to say that all rooms are potential nap rooms. So, too, are rental cars pulled off at rest stops and any seat on an airliner -- from the moment it pulls away from the ramp until they wake you up so you can refuse the pretzels.
Sleeping in
This eternal grogginess may run in the family.
Last week, there was a note on the kitchen table: "Please make sure I'm up by 1:15."
A child -- I will conceal the identity by giving neither age nor sex -- was afraid of missing a 2 p.m. dental appointment.
Families all across the country are discovering this month that their teenaged and early-20s children cannot have slept a wink the previous school year. Now that school is out, sleeping in is in -- unless, of course, a summer job happens to get in the way.
School debate
Sleep, or lack of sleep, is even causing some education experts to rethink their theories on school. There is a debate in Australia about the connection between the teenaged inability to wake up and a lack of proper nutrition. So many Australian teens are either too tired to eat, or running too late for breakfast, that they are left disorganized and relying on terrible eating patterns, including the use of sugar just to keep them going through the day.
A group of Canadian researchers concluded not long ago that adolescents would be much better off if classes began at noon instead of first thing in the morning.
They pegged the age at which the internal clock springs out of sync as being 12.9 years -- moments before becoming a teen -- and after that, to all intents and purposes, a typical teenager is merely sleepwalking through morning classes.
Usually the fog lifts by the 20s; sometimes never.
My own personal fog, just for the record, lands right about ... now.
(Twenty minutes later:)
But then, of course, I recover brilliantly, returning to the above first rough draft to polish and wrap up in such a way that it will leave those readers who return refreshed from their own quick naps nodding in agreement.