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Spain’s Siesta Being Reconsidered
This entry was posted on March 25, 2014.
Sleep scientists and researchers are paying special attention to a recent political issue in the country of Spain. Long known for its daily siesta and its late night life, the country is currently giving serious consideration to revising its workday schedule and eliminating the siesta that has long been a part of its culture.
Most people are aware that when visiting Spain they need to adjust their expectation of when to shop and when to eat. Most businesses don’t open until late, close down for a couple of hours in the afternoon and then are open late. Dinners don’t usually get eaten until ten o’clock at night, and popular television shows don’t air until between midnight and one o’clock in the morning. Though this adds a certain level of charm, it has wreaked havoc with the Spanish economy. The Spanish clock is not really in sync with any of the world’s other leading economies, and perhaps more importantly, the Spanish workforce is increasingly exhausted after what Ignacio Buqueras, president of the Association for the Radonalization of Spanish Working Hours, refers to as 71-years of jet lag.
Why 71 years? What most people do not realize about the Spanish system is that it came into being at the onset of World War II, when Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco decided to show his solidarity with Nazi Germany by changing the country’s time zone to that of Hitler’s Germany. That means that though the country is physically on the same time zone as Britain and Morocco, its clocks are set to the same time as Poland and Hungary.
The politics and economies of the issue aside, the system also is at odds with human evolution and circadian rhythms, which are established by our exposure to the sun’s light. Though Spain’s siesta system of working in the morning and then taking a long nap in the afternoon, followed by working until 8 p.m. may have made sense when people worked on their own farms and close to their own homes, today it makes little sense for people to commute back to their homes to take a nap. That means that instead of resting, the working populace is largely taking very extended lunch breaks and then returning to work. The long lunches often leave them sleepy, and the two hours away from their work leaves them with a heavy workload that needs to be completed while they are at their most exhausted. They return home at 8 p.m. and are still adhering to the existing schedule of eating late dinners and staying up late for their entertainment, which means that they are getting less sleep than any other nation and have a much lower productivity, as well as all of the related health problems that have come to be associated with sleep deprivation.
Though proponents of adjusting the Spanish schedule believe that it will improve the economy, many question whether a habit that is so long-ingrained will actually change.
