"....consider the siesta. The timing of the traditional siesta corresponds to a natural post-lunch dip in our circadian rhythms, and studies have shown that people who catnap are generally more productive and may even enjoy lower risk of death from heart disease. It is the Spanish who have made the siesta famous. Unfortunately, Spaniards no longer live close enough to work to go home and nap. Instead some use the afternoon break to go out for long lunches with friends and colleagues. Having spent two hours at lunch, Spanish workers then cannot finish work until seven or eight. But even then they don't always go home. They go out for drinks or dinner instead. (Go to a Spanish disco at midnight and you're likely to be dancing alone; their prime-time TV shows are just ending.)
Lately the Spanish have begun to take the problem of sleep deprivation seriously. The police now question drivers in serious accidents about how long they slept the night before, and the government has recently mandated shorter hours for its employees to try to get them home earlier.
What has motivated the Spanish to take action against sleepiness is not so much their accident rate—historically among the highest in western Europe—as their flat productivity. The Spanish spend more time at work and their productivity is less than most of their European neighbors. "It's one thing to log hours, another to get something done," Ignacio Buqueras y Bach, a 68-year-old businessman who has spearheaded the attempt to get Spaniards to bed earlier, lectured his countrymen in a Madrid newspaper recently.
"Every once in a while we have to close our eyes," Buqueras told me. "We're not machines."
In 2006 a commission formed by Buqueras to change things became part of the Spanish government. Two years later I had occasion to go to one of the commission's meetings in the annex to the Congreso de los Diputados, the lower house of Spain's legislative branch. An assortment of modern Spanish grandees testified to the problem. They spoke of accidents by tired workers, Spanish women doubly exhausted by long work hours and household duties, and small children deprived of their proper ten to twelve hours of sleep. Members were urged to contact the television networks to see if they would consider moving prime time earlier.
Buqueras kept the meeting moving, exhorting the speakers to adhere to a "telegraphic brevity." But the lights were low and the room warm. In the audience a few participants' heads began to slump to their chests, then pop back up as they resisted, then their eyes closed more fully, their programs lowering to their laps, as they began to pay back their nation's sleep debt".