What Happened to the Afternoon Rest?

Around 2:30 in the afternoon, modern life offers you several options.

Coffee.

An energy drink.

A little treat.

A walk around the building.

Or a motivational speech to yourself about pushing through.

What it generally does not offer is the option humans in plenty of places arrived at a long time ago:

Go sit down for a little while.

Maybe even close your eyes.

Somewhere along the way, we turned an ordinary dip in energy into a productivity problem.

And then created an entire industry to help us defeat it.

Which made me wonder:

What happened to the afternoon rest?

Say "siesta" and most of us picture Spain.

A sleepy little town. Shutters closed. Shops taking a break after lunch.

But midday rest has never belonged to Spain alone.

Versions of it developed across Mediterranean countries, Latin America and other parts of the world. Research on sleep across cultures describes biphasic sleep patterns in some Latin and Caribbean communities, where nighttime sleep is accompanied by a shorter rest during the day. Daytime napping traditions also appear across parts of Asia and Africa.

Even the word siesta reaches further back. It comes from the Latin sexta, referring to the sixth hour of the day, around midday.

And in many places, resting in the afternoon made practical sense.

Imagine working outdoors before air conditioning.

The sun is directly overhead.

The temperature is climbing.

You have already been working since morning.

Maybe the smartest thing isn't to prove how tough you are.

Maybe you stop.

Eat.

Rest.

Then continue when the worst heat has passed.

Historical research on preindustrial Europe notes that people in places such as Spain and Italy used daytime rest in part to cope with intense midday heat.

The day didn't necessarily have to be one uninterrupted block of productivity.

Work could have a rhythm.

This is where the story gets more interesting.

Once you stop looking at the afternoon rest as a quaint Spanish custom, you start finding versions of the same instinct elsewhere.

In parts of the Middle East, midday sleep has long had cultural and religious significance. The Arabic tradition of qailulah, for example, refers to midday rest or sleep and has longstanding roots in Islamic life.

Other cultures developed their own relationships with daytime sleep.

Different climate.

Different customs.

Different schedules.

But a recurring idea:

The entire day did not necessarily have to be lived at the same speed.

That feels almost radical now.

Our schedules look very different.

For many people, the workday now has a beginning and an end, and everything in between is expected to remain reasonably productive.

9:00.

10:00.

11:00.

Lunch.

1:00.

2:00.

3:00.

4:00.

Keep going.

Industrialization didn't single-handedly "kill the siesta," and midday-rest traditions haven't disappeared. Work schedules still vary enormously around the world.

But industrial and modern work helped normalize something very different from agricultural and household rhythms:

time standardized by the clock.

Factories, offices, schools and eventually global businesses work better when everybody agrees that certain hours belong to work.

Your body's opinion on the matter is less convenient.

And around the middle of the afternoon, it occasionally files a complaint.

We call it the post-lunch dip, which makes it sound like your sandwich did this to you.

Sometimes lunch certainly doesn't help.

Eat a huge meal and you may not exactly feel ready to conquer the world afterward.

But researchers have found something more interesting.

The afternoon dip in alertness can occur even when people haven't eaten lunch. Studies suggest there is a biological increase in sleepiness during the midafternoon that appears to be connected to our circadian system rather than simply what we ate.

In other words:

Your body may naturally have a little dip built into the day.

That doesn't mean everyone needs a nap.

It doesn't mean your body is demanding two hours in bed at 2 PM.

And if you're profoundly exhausted every afternoon despite adequate sleep, that's a different conversation.

But it does make our modern response a little funny.

Our biology says:

I'm slowing down a bit.

Modern life says:

Have you considered espresso?

Think about how many tools we have for staying "on."

Coffee.

Energy drinks.

Bright office lights.

Phones.

Music.

Snacks.

Standing desks.

Cold water.

Another coffee.

Some of those things are perfectly useful.

I enjoy coffee. I'm not here to start trouble.

But our first instinct when energy dips is almost always:

How do I make this go away?

Rarely:

Maybe I need ten quiet minutes.

And there's a cultural piece to this too.

An adult sleeping in the middle of a workday can look lazy.

An adult carrying a giant coffee because they only slept five hours?

Somehow that can look productive.

We have some strange ideas about rest.

This is where we shouldn't romanticize the old way just because it's old.

Research on daytime napping is complicated.

Short naps can reduce sleepiness and may support alertness, learning, memory and mood in some circumstances.

But longer or frequent daytime sleeping has also been associated in observational studies with some poorer health outcomes, particularly in certain populations. That doesn't necessarily mean naps caused those problems. People who are already ill, sleeping badly at night or experiencing other health issues may simply nap more. Researchers are still working through that relationship.

So I'm not proposing:

BREAKING: Everyone must take a siesta.

Good luck explaining that to your boss.

I'm interested in something broader than naps.

Rest.

A slower lunch.

Ten minutes outside.

Closing your eyes.

Sitting somewhere without answering anything.

Not scheduling every minute between morning and bedtime.

Allowing the day to have different speeds.

I think this is part of why the afternoon rest interests me.

We've gotten very good at thinking of rest as what happens after everything is done.

After work.

After the dishes.

After the children are settled.

After the emails.

After the errands.

After you've earned it.

Which is a bit of a setup, because everything is never done.

There will always be another email.

Another load of laundry.

Another notification.

Another thing that technically could be accomplished.

Older daily rhythms weren't necessarily easier. In many cases, people did harder physical work than most of us do today.

But work and rest could be woven together differently.

Maybe that's the piece worth looking at.

Not recreating some romantic village where everyone disappears for a three-hour nap after lunch.

Just questioning the assumption that a productive day must be one continuous stretch of output.

This might be the funniest part.

We changed the schedule.

We invented air conditioning.

We moved indoors.

We created fluorescent offices and video calls and laptops.

We can order coffee without leaving our desks.

But somewhere around 2 or 3 PM, plenty of people still feel it.

The eyelids get a little heavier.

Concentration gets harder.

You reread the same sentence.

Suddenly the snack drawer becomes extremely interesting.

The afternoon dip survived all our productivity improvements.

Maybe because it was never simply a bad habit to begin with.

I'm not suggesting we shut down American offices every afternoon.

Although I suspect some of you would support this investigation.

I'm wondering whether we've become so focused on managing our time that we've forgotten to notice our energy.

Those aren't always the same thing.

Some hours are naturally better for deep concentration.

Some are better for movement.

Some are better for conversation.

And some may be asking for a little less from us.

The old afternoon-rest traditions don't have to become another wellness hack.

You don't need a "scientifically optimized 17-minute Mediterranean productivity nap."

Please don't let us do that to the siesta.

Maybe the lesson is simpler.

Human beings have spent a very long time arranging daily life around light, heat, work, meals and energy.

Modern schedules rearranged a lot of that.

Our bodies didn't necessarily get the memo.

So the next time 2:30 rolls around and you feel yourself slowing down, maybe the question doesn't always have to be:

How do I push through this?

Maybe sometimes it's:

What if I slowed down for a minute?

Not because you're lazy.

Not because you've failed at productivity.

Because days have rhythms.

And perhaps we were never meant to move through every hour at exactly the same speed.

Let's make sense of it.

Until next time,
Tami
Founder and Curious Editor
Roots & Rhythms