In every lunch-gathering with close relatives, or close friends, at least one or two person take a short nap on the couch after the lunch, while the rest are having a relaxed and low voice chat. Usually the persons who fall asleep are males.
By not confusing actually doing work with being kept busy for 16 hours to please the "company" / "boss".
Plus, it's not like this happens everytime and for everyone. People in Greece work longer hours than most of Europeans.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/05/16...
Japan has its own word "inemuri" for the practice of sleeping on the job, which is sometimes even faked to make it look like they're working hard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inemuri
Recently this practice has become more accepted company policy. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/06/07/editorials/po...
Huh. Definitely not a part of American work culture - it's likely you'll wake up with a pink slip taped to your face.
I could as well take a nap and then get back to work with renewed energy.
Given the right architecture (high ceiling, verandah, stone walls) a shift in work day like this can offset high temperatures without using huge amounts of electricity for air conditioning.
PS: Judging by the Chinese overseas students I meet I think 16 hour work days may become a memory in a generation or two.
I'm afraid to take a full nap at work due to how it may look. Do you find yourself being judged for taking naps at work?
Don't have a car? Go in a park!
Generally, you can take a nap fine in the day. Bring a book and sleep with the book on your chest. Nobody is going to disturb someone that fell asleep reading a book.
This works well because we often take lunch at home. But, now that I have lunch at the office, I do the same. I have a 1 hour pause. The first half hour I have lunch, then I take the coffee and I go to the office to sleep on the floor, on a very thin mattress. If my brain is too active, I listen to a foreign radio station with my iPhone. I like to listen to ICI Radio Canada (in French). When I have lunch here, they broadcast the morning news and commentary. The news are about stuff happening in Quebec. It is interesting enough for me to forget the work stuff, and dull enough to induce me into a deeper relaxation state, which allows me to fall sleep fast. Being the broadcast in a foreing language, also helps to fall sleep. I often dream during this 20-30 minutes naps.
An interesting detail is that I had to learn this habit. I remember being a child and being pissed off because I wasn't allowed to make noise after lunch. Now, that I'm a father, the roles are changing and I'm the one sleeping after lunch.
By the way, at night, in order to fall sleep, I never take phones, tablets or computers to my bedroom. Instead, I take a shortwave radio and I tune the BBC world service news (fortunately, in Spain we can hear the broadcast directed to Africa). I put a 30 minutes timer on the radio and I almost never hear it stopping, because I fall sleep before. The day that the BBC will shut the SW broadcast, I guess I will take a bluetooth headset or speaker to my bedroom, but not the iPhone. It is very important to avoid computers in the bedroom.