Work Hard, Sleep Hard

A question that plagued me throughout my career: why did I always get tired in the afternoon? (One could have surmised that the excitement of accounting work would have kept me awake.)

(Image from healthylife)

According to current scientific thinking [bold added]

Humans are biologically programmed to sleep at night, and to take a nap in the midafternoon, though scientists aren’t sure why. “There is no melatonin triggering the sleep, it just seems to be this harmonic phenomenon,” [Univ. of Pennsylvania Dr. David] Dinges says. The consensus among his colleagues, he says, is that human civilization evolved mostly in equatorial climates, where it got very hot later in the day, and napping during the extreme heat optimized work performance.

Modern workers shouldn't fight to stay awake; they can say "I was optimizing my work performance" or "the harmonic phenomena were overwhelming."

I was born 40 years too soon.