GIVING IT A REST
HOUSTON GETS FIRST NAP BAR FOR A QUICK, DAYTIME SNOOZE
Khaliah Guillory has taken enough midday naps in her car to figure out all the shortcomings that offers in Houston. Cars get hot, the sun’s too bright, and then there’s that crick in your neck. But for more than a decade, as a ladder-climber in corporate America, she saw it as one of the only ways to sneak some shut-eye into a crowded schedule, guaranteeing she’d be at her best during too-long workdays.
For a long time, she thought: There’s gotta be a better way.
Now, she says, there is. At the beginning of April, Guillory will launch Houston’s first Nap Bar, a space where Houstonians can rent a napping pod for 20 minutes or so, shut out the light, bury their noses into aromatherapy-spritzed pillows and grab the one thing most Americans can agree they’re lacking — sleep.
The “bar,” which serves fresh juice and coffee but no alcohol, is part of a slow-growing global trend. A smattering of similar spots has popped up in other parts of the world, including Madrid and New York City, and corporate outposts including Google have fitted their offices with nap pods. But largely, the idea of creating a boutique space for a quick rest is still rare. Guillory hopes to change that. “The white space is crazy. There are only three or four locations doing this, and their approach is 180 degrees difference from us because, for one thing, we’re priding ourselves on a 100 percent organic experience,” she said last Thursday, as she sat outside the nap room in the space she rented at the back of the organic mattress shop, New Living, on Kirby.
The novelty of her idea has brought with it a lot of attention, including, she said, a steady stream of naysayers.
“We already know what the data is telling us: NASA found that a 26-minute power nap increased productivity by 34 percent and alertness by 54 percent,” she said. “But some people are skeptical about this concept. I was listening to a radio show yesterday, and they were talking about us, like, ‘I can just nap in my car for free!’ Yeah, but what’s the quality of your nap?”
At Nap Bar, she homes in on that quality. There are black-out curtains, organic mattresses, chamomile and lavender scents to make you sleepy and even a soundtrack
curated by a friend of Guillory’s who splits her time between a sleep doctor and a deejay. During beta testing, she said nine of the 13 people who tested the pods were able to doze off, even though all had been dubious that they’d sleep.
On Thursday, I tried for myself, booking a 20-minute session and tuning out the world in what was an incredibly peaceful experience. Alas, my wicked brain kept me awake, as it is wont to do when I’d rather it shut itself off. I know this about myself, though. I’ve never been the person who can fall asleep quickly. So if I were to book a session at Nap Bar again, I’d likely skip over the 20- and 26minute options and go for an hour-long session, so I have some time to power down first.
Still, I wouldn’t want to sleep too long, and neither would you.
“Naps should be shorter. While it can be as little as five minutes, 20 to 30 minutes is ideal,” said Dr. Reeba Mathew, co-director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Memorial Hermann Hospital and UTHealth. “Any time we go beyond 30 minutes, we go into the deeper phases of sleep. And when we wake up out of that deeper phase, we feel groggy.”
Mathew hasn’t tried the Nap Bar. But she’s a general supporter of naps, and a fount of data about how sleep deprived Americans are as a whole, and the benefits of trying to reclaim lost hours of sleep during convenient dips in the day. Even for people who aren’t sleep deprived — meaning those who get at least seven to eight hours a night — there’s a natural dip in one’s circadian rhythm around 3 or 4 p.m. each day that will leave one feeling drowsy. A nap could fix that and bring about better cognitive function and improved performance in the hours after it, she said.
With the Nap Bar scheduled to open in April, it remains to be seen whether it will take off here in Houston. But Guillory is optimistic. Her sleep pods — long lie-flat beds snugged inside wooden cubbies with soundproof curtains — are patentpending, and she has a trademark pending as well. By the fall, she’d like to have a mobile “snoozers unit,” which she describes as something akin to a food truck for nap pods. In a year’s time, she hopes the Kirby shop will be her flagship, with other locations spread across Houston.
If the stats are right, she reasons, and more than half of Americans are sleep deprived, then there’s a real need in the market. And though her prices are higher than a free nap in your car, with her lowest-priced option, the 20-minute session, ringing in at $25, and a monthly membership, which includes four naps, costing $179, she thinks demand for convenient, health-conscious boutique options is great enough. She notes she’s been approved to accept health-spending-account funds.
“There’s a science behind this to support our thought process,” she said. “But at the end of the day, we trust the humans coming in here to know what they need.”