An afternoon nap may seem like a luxury to most small business owners. We tend to associate it with lazy folk who live in hot climates and eat dinner around midnight.

However, a new book by Harvard University sleep expert Dr Sara Mednick, Take a Nap! Change Your Life, describes the the practice of taking a nap as a “lifesaving habit”. She claims that snoozers make fewer mistakes and enjoy “boosted brainpower”.

One of her experiments involved one group taking a nap, another group drinking a mug of coffee (200mg of caffeine), and a control group taking a placebo.

They were then given a series of tasks, including typing and spatial skill tests. The coffee drinkers performed much worse than the placebo takers, while the nappers performed best of all. So the common assumption that coffee will keep us going through the day is simply not true.

Dr Mednick, a psychologist and research scientist, has accumulated a lot of evidence that a simple siesta in the afternoon is the best medicine for a more productive work life. In addition, people who sleep for 30 minutes at least three times a week had a 37 percent lower chance of a heart attack, according to a lead researcher from the Harvard School of Public Health.

In another study, recently published in Nature Neuroscience journal, the Dr Mednick put 30 well-rested people through the same set of tasks four times in the course of a day, starting at 9am through to 7pm.

Performance dropped by 50 percent in those who stayed awake all day. However, the volunteers who took an afternoon nap kept up their performance throughout the day.

NASA has also made a contribution. Tests conducted by them show that astronauts who took a brief snooze doubled their alertness even if they were not tired before the nap. They also increased their work productivity by at least 13 percent.

The ideal time to nap apparently is between 1pm and 3pm which enables the most restful kind of sleep pattern for boosting performance.

Small business owners need to keep on top of their game since they rarely have a backup team ready to take over at short notice. Time off can cause all sorts of problems, especially if it’s prolonged. Half an hour a day would seem a small sacrifice to keep on keeping on.