Cultivating the "Baporiyu"

In my piece on Sleep, the sixth question I asked (and answered) was “Do Daytime Naps Help?”. The answer is that they do help, though whether you nap for 25 or 35 minutes is irrelevant, while longer naps may not help.

“Baporiyu” is a Gujarati word for an afternoon siesta, most famously associated with the city of Rajkot, where everyone stops working in the afternoon, goes home to have lunch and naps. For many, the term is slang for not just an afternoon nap but also afternoon sex. Our focus in this article, is entirely on the nap portion of the “baporiyu”…

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A recent study, earlier this year, by Pedro Bessone and colleagues in the Quarterly Journal of Economics [1] looked at sleep issues in 452 low-income adults in Chennai. Using actigraphs, they measured sleep length and quality at night and at work (daytime naps were built into the study).

Not surprisingly, they found that though most participants did manage to sleep for 8 hours a day, their sleep quality was poor (an average of just 5.5 hours), mainly due to interruptions from noise, light and other stimuli. After interventions that helped them sleep more, there was an increase in the amount of sleep, but there was no improvement in the sleep quality and no change in productivity or performance parameters on cognition tests.

On the other hand, daytime naps of around 30 minutes in office, with fewer interruptions and stimuli, led to superior sleep quality and increased productivity with improved performance on cognitive tests. However (since this is after all an economics journal), the productivity gains did not compensate for the opportunity cost (the time lost due to sleep) as far as the company was concerned.

A recent study out of Japan in 389 elderly individuals followed over 5 years, showed a reduction in the rate of cognitive decline with less than 30 minutes of daytime napping [2].

These studies are just two of a few that have started looking at real-life examples of the benefits of daytime naps, outside of laboratory settings. Hopefully, we will know more in the years to come.

Having said that, anecdotally, daytime naps make a difference in how the rest of the day goes. And if your nighttime sleep is just a little less than the usual 7-8 hours, a daytime nap does help in improving productivity and alertness for the rest of the evening. I nap every day, and have been doing so for the last 20 odd years and I believe it helps me function better. This is my bland, only nap version of a “baporiyu”.

In our atmasvasth quest to live long, healthy, are daytime naps mandatory? I don’t think we have an answer as yet. However, it is worth trying them out, if you haven’t as yet. If daytime, afternoon naps make you work better in the evenings or make you feel better, perhaps they are a habit worth cultivating and incorporating in your daily schedule, especially since there is no real downside to sleeping in the afternoon…as long as the “baporiyu” does include some sleep time…

Footnotes

1. Bessone P et al. The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor. Q J Econ. 2021 Apr 8;136(3):1887-1941.

2. Kitamura K et al. Short daytime napping reduces the risk of cognitive decline in community-dwelling older adults: a 5-year longitudinal study. BMC Geriatr. 2021 Aug 28;21(1):474.

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