LARRUZFounder | Author & Creator of BYOAI

The NASA Nap Culture: Boosting Alertness & Productivity with Short Naps

22 Apr 2024 · 1 min

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A short YouTube video (by LARRUZ, Apr 22, 2024) describing NASA's 1980s research into short naps to optimize astronaut performance. Because astronauts experience frequent sunrises/sunsets in orbit, sleep is disrupted and humans become the mission's weak link. Short naps reportedly produced ~20% boost in alertness and ~50% boost in task productivity; the practice spread to terrestrial NASA employees and became known as the "NASA nap culture."

Questions this video answers

1980s

About 20% (short naps)

About 50% (task productivity)

Chapters

NASA figured this out back in the 1980s. They were looking at ways to optimize their astronauts. Because when you are up in orbit, depending on what orbit you're in, you are rotating around the planet maybe 10, 20 times per 24 hours. So you're seeing 10 to, you know, 20 sunsets and sunrises. So your sleep is a total mess. And you can safety check almost everything in terms of technology. But the one weak link in a space mission is this thing called the human being. That's where errors typically happen. And what they found was that these naps produced almost a 20% boost in short naps, 20% boost in their alertness, and almost a 50% boost in the task productivity. And it was so powerful that it translated to the terrestrial employees of NASA on the ground, and it became what was known as the NASA nap culture.