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It’s been mock exam season for my son. He worked hard, dare I say a bit too hard - and one afternoon I walked in to find him slumped at his desk, head buried in books, eyes closed, out for the count. It felt like a snapshot of our work-until-you-drop culture that I fear we’re passing on. So I was interested to see reports, yesterday, about the positive health benefits of intentionally factoring in a nap during the day. An afternoon zizz, it seems, can be as good as a pill for reducing blood pressure, according to a study by Greek doctors. The blood pressure of the people they monitored who napped was 4 per cent lower than those who didn’t - enough, potentially, to reduce the risk of a heart attack by 10 per cent. Coincidentally, we also heard yesterday of a set of draft guidelines advising that many more people on a lower risk-threshold should be prescribed drugs to head off high blood pressure and hypertension. It’s a great thing, of course, that we’ve access to that kind of health care, especially for those who need it most. But isn’t it crucial, too, that we help ourselves, and each other, culturally, to challenge the assumption that taking any kind of rest from work is sub-optimal, and that “if you snooze, you lose”. It often seems we need permission to give ourselves a break; in fact, the sleep expert Matthew Walker says that scientists such as he are now lobbying doctors to start “prescribing ... sleep” for that very reason. It’s not just about our health, either, but ‘performance’. The organisational expert Tony Schwartz points out that sleep is one of the first behaviours we sacrifice ... because mistakenly we think we’ll be more productive by staying awake longer. And in workplaces that have installed areas for rest and even sleep on his advice, people still fear to use them, he says, because they still feel compelled to look busy. And that’s for me when rest becomes a spiritual issue, too. Because it’s not just about collapsing now and then to recover from a lifestyle we otherwise have no intention of changing. Instead, surely the challenge is to find ways to transform life as we know it, so we can bring to it the very best of who, and how, we are. To cultivate, for example, in those lovely (paraphrased) words of Jesus, “unforced rhythms of grace”. We’re into Lent, now, when we could give ourselves 40 days or so of permission to give up looking busy, and to establish some simple life-giving habits instead. A Saturday morning lie-in, perhaps? Go on, press the snooze!