When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

One study makes this case. The experimenters divided participants into three groups and gave them all a thirty-minute midafternoon break before sitting them at a driving simulator. One group received a placebo pill. The second received two hundred milligrams of caffeine. The third received that same two hundred milligrams of caffeine and then took a brief nap. When it came time to perform, the caffeine-only group outperformed the placebo group. But the group that ingested caffeine and then had a nap easily bested them both.55 Since caffeine takes about twenty-five minutes to enter the bloodstream, they were getting a secondary boost from the drug by the time their naps were ending. Other researchers have found the same results—that caffeine, usually in the form of coffee, followed by a nap of ten to twenty minutes, is the ideal technique for staving off sleepiness and increasing performance.56 As for me, after a few months of experimenting with twenty-minute afternoon naps, I’ve converted. I’ve gone from nap detractor to nap devotee, from someone ashamed to nap to someone who relishes the coffee-then-nap combination known as the “nappuccino.”*