When we hear the name Homer Simpson, the word “genius” rarely comes to mind. But when Homer gets hired to motivate the employees of the Globex company, and he discovers his workforce is exhausted from being overworked and not getting enough sleep, his solution is nothing short of brilliant.

“Sir, I need to know where I can get some business hammocks.”

The purity of Homer’s request strikes his boss Hank Scorpio so profoundly, that he has no other choice but to reply: “Hammocks? My goodness, what an idea. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Unfortunately, most would view this scene as just another tribute to Homer’s unbelievable laziness, instead of seeing it as a lesson for employers on how to increase the overall alertness and productivity of their workforce. According to multiple studies conducted by researchers, doctors, the military, NASA scientists and neuroscientists, the correct perspective is the latter. This article takes a look at naps, and why every company should encourage their employees to take them.

Profits: The Siesta Assassin

The Spanish word siesta comes from the Latin hora sexta, which means “the sixth hour.” Counting forward from sunrise the sixth hour represents midday, when the sun is highest and the belly is usually fullest from a huge lunch. The perfect time for a nap.

However, you don’t need to live in Spain, to feel the post-lunch drowsiness taking hold of your body and soul. When 1:30-2:30 pm rolls around, it feels like you’re fighting against the universe, and every inch of your system wants to shut down. It’s very difficult to focus while keeping your forehead from bouncing off the keyboard.

According to Max Hirshkowitz, director of the Sleep Center at Houston’s Michael E. DeBakery Veterans Affairs Medical Center and an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine, “We’re biologically programmed to take a nap in midafternoon… It’s the Industrial Revolution that separated us from siesta, because it was too expensive to shut down big machines in the middle of the day and turn them back on.”

Sadly, even Spain’s napping days are numbered. In the last few years, the Spanish government has been trying to pull its workers out of their siesta-centric lifestyles. Most businesses close between 1:30 and 4:30 pm, with employees then working until 8pm. But this old tradition makes it very difficult for Spain to compete with the rest of Europe, as they are out of sync with everyone else’s business schedules.

In the race to the top I tend to agree that three-hour lunches are a bit excessive and would leave most companies in the dust. On the surface it only seems logical that more labor equals more profits. But what most industrialized nations don’t realize is that ignoring the body’s need for rest not only decreases productivity in the long run, but ends up costing them billions over time.

Counting Sheep to Save Lives

• According to the National Institute of Health, more than 50 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep disorders. Without treatment, these disorders can lead to heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, diabetes and depression.
• A study conducted at Cornell University discovered that tired employees represent an annual cost of $150 billion to the U.S. industry from reduced job productivity and fatigue-related accidents.
• In the report Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation: An Unmet Public Health Problem, the Institute of Medicine estimates that “hundreds of billions of dollars a year are spent on direct medical costs related to sleep disorders, such as doctor visits, hospital services, prescriptions, and over-the-counter medications.”
• One fifth of all major car crash injuries are linked with impaired-driving due to lack of sleep. This number does not include alcohol-related accidents.

Suddenly business hammocks are starting to look more like medical prescriptions than typical Homer-style foolery.

Power Naps: If They’re Good Enough for Rocket Scientists…

NASA conducted a study on one thousand of its employees, including military pilots and astronauts, where half of them took a 30-minute power nap after lunch, and the rest would plough right through the day. They discovered that those who napped not only demonstrated enhanced performances with reduced errors, they also improved their cognitive abilities by 40%. They scored higher on IQ tests, and even their memorization skills drastically improved.

Unbreak My Heart with Some Shut Eye

Heart disease takes over 650,000 American lives each year, making it the number one killer in the nation. Dimitrios Trichopoulos from the Harvard School of Public Health stated that “taking a nap could turn out to be an important weapon in the fight against coronary mortality.” Dimitrios led the largest study to date on the midday nap and its effect on the human heart. It involved 23,681 people living in Greece who had no histories of heart conditions, strokes or cancer. The massive study unveiled the fact that people who took a 30-minute nap at least three times a week lowered their chances of heart-related deaths by 37%!

Meet Dr. Sleep

Dr. Sara C. Mednick, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego and author of the revolutionary book “Take a Nap! Change Your Life” has dedicated her life to teaching people how to do just that. Her research has proven that “without a midday rest, we are not able to perform at optimal levels throughout the day. In fact, our performance falls apart. Napping maintains and even boosts our skills.” Her book also demonstrates how a 20-30- minute nap, three times a week can make you look younger, increase your sex drive, and help you to lose weight.

How to Nap

Many of you are probably thinking at this point “zzzzz”. What I mean is, you could probably close your eyes right now and fall into a deep coma. You probably don’t need any tips on how to let your body do what it’s been craving to do since you left kindergarten, but there are ways to optimize your sleep to ensure full relaxation and revitalization.

• Try to find a space where you can turn off the lights. If this isn’t possible, get yourself eye covers or an eye mask. The simulated darkness will cause the body to produce the sleep chemical Melatonin.
• Get comfortable. Simply resting your head on your desk with your arms dangling below is not an ideal napping posture. The last thing you want is to wake up with the “Q” from your keyboard stuck to your head. Laying out flat on your back, with your hands comfortably at your sides or resting on your chest is ideal.
• Make sure your space is quiet. If there are too many ambient sounds, try using earplugs or earphones to listen to soothing music.
• Breathe. Many people, me included, have a hard time falling asleep due to an overactive brain. As soon as your eyes close, your brain starts trying to solve all the problems of the universe, from your personal taxes to peace in the Middle East. The trick to solving this is to focus on your breathing. Deeply inhale through your nose, and slowly exhale out your mouth. I like to imagine my breaths are like the waves of the ocean, inhaling out to sea, and exhaling onto the sandy beach. Concentrate on relaxing your body, one muscle at a time, starting from your face and working your way down to your toes. Trust me, you’ll most likely be unconscious by the time you reach your elbows.
• Set an alarm. You also don’t want to sleep for too long. 10-20 minutes is ideal for full body and mind revitalization. Any longer than that and you’ll suffer from what’s known as “sleep inertia.” This is the feeling of grogginess and disorientation associated from waking out of a deep sleep, and can last anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour.

NASA Powered Business Hammocks

The only problem with Homer’s idea for business hammocks was that he was thinking too small! Believe it or not there are spas out there dedicated to helping you get the afternoon power nap you deserve. In New York City for example there are companies like Yelo and MetroNaps, who offer a variety of comfortable sleeping pods fully equipped with customized aromatherapy, ambient sound and lighting. There is also a MetroNaps in Australia, who not only offers Energy Pods, Napshells and Zero Gravity napping chairs powered by NASA, they will come to your company to install their napping equipment, and offer seminars on how to integrate sleep into the workplace and fatigue management.

Most bosses would have scoffed at Homer for having such a silly idea, calling him lazy while questioning his management skills. Hank Scorpio, however, immediately saw the value in supplying his overworked employees with hammocks. A good afternoon power snooze not only improves cognitive function, increases production and boosts morale, it prolongs human life by reducing the risk of heart disease. And with that in mind, I’m off to sleep!

When I was in university, I used to absolutely love studying and writing papers. Wait! Before you throw me into the nerd dumpster, hear me out. Okay, the actual work involved with cramming mind-numbing textbook information into my head, or making sure every sentence I typed was properly referenced, quoted, footnoted and endnoted was extremely tedious indeed. But, as endless as some of those homework nights seemed to be, I was genuinely happy to be there. The reason? I had inadvertently constructed a workplace so comfortable, so conducive to both concentration and creativity, that I thoroughly enjoyed hibernating there for hours on end. I say inadvertently, because back then I was relatively clueless when it came to workplace mood-enhancement techniques, and it was only years later that I discovered the value in the things I did.

The following is a tour of my favorite workspace (I wish I had pictures!), as well as a guide on how to increase the overall happiness of your employees, and in turn their productivity, simply by making the office a better place to be.

The Lounge

I shared the apartment I lived in during my five year university run (I took my time!) with three other roommates. It occupied the upper levels of a duplex, and had two floors of its own: four decently-sized bedrooms and a bathroom on the top floor, with a kitchen, dining room, living room, powder room, and a spare room, which we called “The Lounge”, on the first floor. The lounge is where I spent most of my time.

The lounge was a square room with high ceilings and a giant window looking out into the city. It had one low hanging lamp in the center, and we added an extra standing lamp for the corner; both lamps were on dimmer switches. I placed a round hardwood table in the center of the room, and we still had enough space for a book shelf, a comfortable couch and an extra full-sized, old- fashioned fridge. We affectionately named the couch “the drain” because as soon as you sat in it, it drained you of your will to remain conscious.

Three of the walls were painted sky blue, the fourth was a gorgeous wall of exposed brick. The room received lots of sunlight during the day, and you could adjust the lighting to your liking at night. I would also light scented candles provided by one of the two girls living there, and sometimes I would burn incense. A large colorful painting hung on the brick wall, and a huge picture frame containing multiple fun pictures of our various adventures hung on the opposing blue wall. A small stereo rested on the bookshelf, but due to roommates watching TV in the living room, I would often plug my headphones in my laptop or iPod.

Can you picture it? How do you think you’d feel working in a room like this, even if the work itself was less than thrilling? This might sound crazy, but I miss doing homework in the lounge; I was never more productive, focused, and generally happy to create.

Let’s examine the elements that made the lounge so special, and see if we can transform your office into a place where people are happy to work.

Lighting

Arguably the most important aspect of filmmaking is lighting. Aside from being responsible for exposing the film itself, aside from allowing us to see anything in the first place, the mood for each scene is largely determined by how the set is lit. If someone’s mood can be altered by the lighting from a movie, imagine the effect on that person from being submersed in unfiltered, linear fluorescent office lights from 9-5, Monday to Friday, year after year.

The lounge was easy to light. We had a direct source above the table, providing the right amount of task lighting, and an ambient source from the corner lamp, both of which were controllable from the dimmer switches. I would often keep things bright when I needed to study, slightly dimmed when I was typing. But that’s just me.

When the office is too harshly lit it can lead to a lack in creativity or concentration, and can also cause headaches, fatigue, stress, and irritability. People are already staring at bright computer screens all day, and don’t require as much direct lighting as their paper pushing counterparts. If you can’t completely transform the office lighting system, at least try to filter those fluorescent bulbs, or place reflectors underneath them to bounce the light off the ceiling. Indirect ambient light is easier on the eyes, as there is less contrast when looking up from your computer screen. Sunlight is also very important, but it should also be filtered with blinds to a certain degree, otherwise computer screens will be impossible to see.

These are very basic tips, when honestly you could write an entire book about lighting. The best advice I’ve read on lighting is to walk into the room, and really think about how the lights makes you feel. Nervous? Stressed? Happy? Calm? Angry? And with a little research on office lighting, you can make the appropriate adjustments.

Color

As I mentioned earlier, three of the lounge’s walls were painted blue, with the fourth wall made of red brick. Turns out, these were the perfect colors to accomplish the tasks I needed to get done. A study conducted at the University of British Columbia involving 600 people demonstrated whether or not cognitive performances were altered by their surrounding colors. Turns out, students sitting in a red room achieved higher results on tests involving memorization and attention to details. Students sitting in a blue room however, scored higher on tests involving creativity and the imagination. Luckily for me, the lounge had both! Whenever I needed to memorize info for exams, the red bricks helped in providing focus. Whenever I was writing, the blue walls helped tap into those creative juices.

Along with the office lighting scheme, the colors on the walls play a huge part in the overall mood and productivity of your employees. The psychology of color is fascinating, and the following is a list of colors to consider for your workspace, as well as some to avoid:

Pale Blue: A very calming color, soothing on the senses and inspiring for the mind. Goes well with dark blue or cream-colored décor.

Moss Green: Also a soothing, relaxing color, light greens mixed with some yellow or blue trims will keep people productive without making them sleepy.

Light Orange: Just thinking about this color perks up your mood and raises your energy levels. Better than any energy drink, light orange will greatly increase office pep.

Magenta: Containing shades of red, purple and pink, magenta is excellent for focus and creativity.

Nice, even colors are always a good idea, even certain grays and beiges can look good when some bright, colorful artwork is hung and some contrasting colored furniture brings the office to life.

Colors to Avoid

While the following colors can be fantastic for your home, enhancing the romance in the bedroom, waking up the family in the kitchen or warming up the living room, they are less than ideal for the office. People spend 8-10 hours a day in these spaces, and too much exposure to these intense colors can evoke feelings of stress, frustration, and even anger.

Sunshine Yellow
Turquoise
Bright Pink
Cherry Red
Dark Purple
Lime Green
Black

Scents

Scent is the most nostalgic of the senses. Certain scents can place you decades into the past, at the very spot where you experienced them for the first time. Depending on the scent this can trigger good feelings via happy memories. It can also bring joy by simply being a delicious scent. It’s very difficult to remain in a bad mood with the smell of fresh apple pie in the air.

My apartment was in the heart of the city, and after a while I very much craved nature and the smells of the forest, especially the smell of smoke from cottage fireplaces in the winter. So whenever I would read or write in the lounge, I would often light some pine-smelling incense, which kept my spirits up and my mind open during those long nights. Well, once again, I later discovered that aromatherapy yields incredible mood enhancement results, with pine in particular being linked to increased productivity. A study conducted in Japan revealed that employees worked better when pine scents were flowing through the ventilation system. Pine is great for keeping you alert, while other smells like pumpkin, cinnamon, and citrus can help to increase focus and creativity.

Of course you can’t go lighting scented candles or incense sticks in the office, as you’ll probably offend your neighboring workers, but you can add a few drops of scented oil to a cotton ball and place it in your desk drawer. You can also keep a small plant on your desk as well. Just be careful when sniffing a Ziplock bag full of pine needles, your co-workers might think you’re weird. Which brings us to our next office mood enhancer…

Plants

I was never very good at remembering to water the plants, but fortunately my roommates were vigilant in their care for the row of window sill plants and herbs we had growing in the lounge.

People often use the term “tree-hugger” in a negative context, but to me there is almost no better image of the relationship humans should share with trees and with nature in general. The city can be an extremely cold and grey place made of concrete and metal, and consistently alienating yourself from nature over time leads to depression. It is no wonder that any greenspaces found in the city are usually jam packed with people on their lunches or office breaks. Just the feeling of grass in between your toes or the sounds of wind blowing through the leaves has a relaxing, revitalizing effect on the human psyche.

This doesn’t mean that it’s time to roll out some grass in the conference rooms, but adding plants to the workplace can do wonders for boosting morale. Plants and trees literally add life to the office, increasing health by generating fresh oxygen, removing toxins from the air, lowering the office temperature to reduce air conditioning usage, all while creating a comforting atmosphere and a happier environment.