A Nap Free Life

Unpopular opinion — I hate naps. Actually, that’s an understatement. I despise them. The feeling of waking up with a sheet imprint on your cheek and wondering what year it is doesn’t appeal to me. Not even a 102 degree fever or week-long chest cold could bring me to curl up on my couch and close my eyes for an hour (which drives my mom crazy).

Naps are a waste of time. According to Forbes, the ideal nap time is 90 minutes. With that hour and a half, I could finish my Spanish worksheet, watch my favorite episode of “Arrested Development” (three times), and paint my nails. Why sleep the day away when you could be productive?

Between trig homework and IB English, the only time I could possibly devote to a nap is a meager half an hour. According to Sleep.org, a thirty-minute nap slows your brain waves down. Your brain enters the deeper stages of sleep — until you wake yourself up after only thirty minutes, feeling more tired than you did before. Science calls it sleep inertia, I call it “headache meets unmotivated.” That grogginess plagues me for the rest of the day, making it hard for me to focus on the sixty pages I have to read of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or memorize the equation for average velocity.

Sleep doesn’t just waste your time through naps. Whenever I sleep past 8 a.m. I feel like I’ve wasted the day. There was time to get a jumpstart on my homework or beat the long wait at Eggtc. for my favorite egg sandwich.

It helps that the rest of my family are early birds. At 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday, I can already hear my little sister watching Netflix’s reboot of “The Magic School Bus” from downstairs and my dad making his coffee. And, even on the days she doesn’t work, my mom will be up before me on a school day. I guess you could say I’ve taken their lead on when to get up.

Even though I get up earlier, I don’t give in to drowsiness and “close my eyes for second” — that’s a nap trap. Thanks to coffee and going to bed by 10, I don’t nap. I can’t and I won’t. I’d rather be exhausted throughout the day and fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow than take sporadic cat naps and not accomplish anything.

I live my life sans naps. And that’s fine with me.