Sleepless in the city: Is it time for sleep pods in offices for that power nap?

Sachin is an autorickshaw driver in Mumbai. He lives in a one-room house with his wife, elderly mother and two children. Needless to say, Sachin does not get the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep. Sometimes in the heat of the day, Sachin naps in the passenger seat of his autorickshaw. In cities across India, it is a familiar sight to see feet poking out of rickshaws and bus stops as people try to have a midday snooze in the heart of a bustling metropolis.

Does sleep deprivation that low-income city dwellers face, caused by sleeping in noisy and polluted conditions, lead to further poverty? Economists from the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Harvard University founded a research lab in Chennai to test this hypothesis. The team studied the sleep patterns of low-income participants within Chennai. As part of the study to improve the quality of sleep, they gave the participants low-cost sleep aids like mosquito repellent, earbuds and eye masks and they provided a place for naps.

What the Chennai sleep-study says

The results were surprising. It turns out longer sleep at night had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, or well-being. However, study participants who took naps in the day were a whopping 2.3 per cent times more productive than those who did not. All for the nominal cost of some earbuds or mosquito spray. It appears Sachin got it right by opting for a mid-afternoon snooze.

Foreign visitors are usually surprised to see Chinese office workers taking a nap in the middle of the day, on top of, or sometimes even curled up under their desks. Nap culture is quite normalised in China and there is no shame in sleeping on your desk for an hour. Work from home during the pandemic offered plenty of opportunities for mid-afternoon naps but as we return to the office, the social taboo of being seen napping at your desk usually puts people off. The Chennai sleep lab study shows that by offering comfortable sleep pods at offices, there could be great payoffs for productivity. Designers are tackling the problem with architectural solutions to help us nap. These include designs for sleep rooms that play pink noise, a frequency said to induce sleep, and sleep boxes in airports that can be rented for naps.

Beatrix Colomina considers this in her essay “Pyjama Party: What we do in bed” for The Architectural Review. About sleeping pods in offices, she says, “Bed and office are never far apart in the 24/7 world. These compact sealed capsules, mini spaceships, can be used in isolation or gathered together in clusters, lined up in rows for synchronised sleep, understood as a part of work rather than its opposite.”

How do you make time for cat naps or restorative sleep when you’re on a 12-16-hour work schedule? Research very strongly backs taking breaks to increase productivity, especially during a long work day. A break can help with focus, recall, creativity and managing stress levels. The ideal ratio is 52 minutes of work to 17 minutes of rest or movement. Studies show that taking a nap is even better for productivity than a non-sleep break. However, if you are not someone who can take a power nap in the middle of the day, the next best thing would be to move away from your screen every hour, get some sunlight and stretch your legs. This ultimately could help you sleep better at night.

Designing sleep-friendly spaces

How we sleep is greatly influenced by our home but more surprisingly, also by our workplace. A study on offices found that working in a windowless cubicle can massively influence our levels of sleep. Researchers found that employees exposed to natural light slept 46 minutes longer and more soundly than did their peers working in windowless offices. This lasts beyond the working week — even on free days, workers with window views were sleeping longer and better.

I am often asked, how do you design a sleep-friendly room in a home, be it a private room or a shared space? “We sleep optimally in quiet, dark and temperature-controlled rooms. Adding heavy-lined curtains to your room can help with both stopping light streaming in and minimising outside noise. Low-cost sleep aids like earplugs and eye-masks can work well too. Experts recommend setting the thermostat to somewhere between 15.6 to 19.4 degrees celsius, but that of course varies depending on personal preference. Daytime sunlight exposure improves both sleep quality and duration and shortens the time taken to fall asleep, so get a lot of sunlight in the day and keep your room as dark as possible at night.

One of the ways to control noise keeping us up at night is to cut down on heavy traffic. Many cities are taking steps to deal with heavy traffic flow by pedestrianising the centre of cities. Barcelona has unveiled plans for superblocks which create mini neighbourhoods by restricting faster traffic to the outer edges. The residual space currently allocated to motorised traffic will be converted into bike paths and green spaces. Apart from making the inner neighbourhoods considerably quieter, it also makes them safer and less polluted.

Sleep-friendly halts on highways

A major concern in a sleepless city is traffic safety. Drivers who get six hours of sleep or less are 33 per cent more likely to have an accident on the road. On the Yamuna Expressway in Uttar Pradesh, where nearly half of all car accidents are caused by drowsy driving, there are some serious measures being considered. The Jewar toll plaza is offering tea and refreshments as well as converting some of their lanes into a place to rest after midnight.

Other measures to reduce accidents caused by sleepy drivers include providing wide road shoulders sealed with a surface that enhances tyre grip, so that it is easier for drivers to regain control if they drift off the road, as well as reducing the monotony of driving on straight roads by adding landscaping and roadside art. Another innovative solution is lining the road with audio-tactile edges so that drivers can hear and feel when their tyres stray from the road.

While it has always been clear that sleep can greatly affect our mood and functioning on a personal level, it is now becoming clear that it can also have an effect at a city-wide level. By designing our cities for better sleep, we could vastly improve urban health, well-being and productivity. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a nap.