Babies and teens do it, but I just can’t nap

This might seem like something of an odd question but can anyone out there teach me how to nap?

Now firmly ensconced in middle age, I had sort of expected napping would just be one of the (few) residual benefits of getting older. My aging body has certainly figured out how to grow prodigious amounts of hair in weird places (nostrils, ear canals) and delivered fairly detailed instructions on what I can eat (vegetables, fruit, fish) and what we can’t (pretty much anything fatty, deep fried, salty, sugary and therefore delicious.)

But I’ve yet to figure out this daytime snoozing thing and I think there are two things holding me back — or keeping me up.

The first is that I sleep OK at night. My wife and I are usually in bed between 9:30 and 10 p.m., watch a little TV and have the lights out before 11 p.m. I generally sleep through the night and get up around 6 a.m. feeling rested, if in need of coffee. If my energy flags in the afternoon, I give myself a little caffeine jolt and continue on my merry, mildly wired way.

And while I don’t usually suffer from insomnia, I do have a relatively serious case of FOSTCOS — Fear Of Sleeping Through Cool Stuff. And this is why I don’t sleep more and definitely not in the daytime.

My life is generally fun. I like my family, my job and my bike. I usually have a stupid project or two on the go (right now I’m restoring a 1990s-era Italian-made steel bicycle.) Most of the time, I wake up thinking about all the things I have o do and just figure I might as well get started instead of hitting the snooze button.

The weekends are even worse. While I might not always leap out of bed on a cold, dark Wednesday morning prepared to attack the day with joy and vigour, on Saturday morning I’m ready to get going on the stuff I want to do: why would I sleep in? And why would I nap? Napping just robs me of more time to do cool and fun stuff.

I have tried napping, with mixed results. Sometimes after a long bike ride or if suffering from the lethargy and weariness that sometimes comes from overindulgence, I can lay down and drift off for a few minutes — but I rarely wake up feeling refreshed.

The rest of my family are fantastic nappers. My wife can sleep pretty much anywhere, at any time. My son, a typical nocturnal teenager, sleeps after school some days and can’t go more than 10 minutes in the car without nodding off. Or maybe he’s just pretending so he doesn’t have to talk to us.

Napping is something I’d like to be good at. I expect that my body might demand more rest as I age and naps will just become a normal part of Sundays. Maybe I just need more practice — or more coffee.