I used to wonder why both my father and my father-in-law ate meals like competitive speed-eaters. Blink, and their plates were empty. Before I could ask if they even tasted the food, they’d already be horizontal on the couch, eyes closed, and on their way to Dreamland. An unbelievable 20 minutes later they’d wake up refreshed, recharged, and ready to tackle the rest of the day like nothing happened. My father would even stop in the middle of a safari in Kenya while surrounded by a pride of lions, driving my mother nuts!
Meanwhile, I’d still be chewing. It baffled me. What was this Gandalf sorcery? Did they have some secret meditation technique? Was there a hidden “Dad Handbook” that explained the art of the lightning-fast lunch followed by the power snooze? And then it happened. One fateful day, I wolfed down pasta in record time during a lunch break at work. (To be clear, I wasn’t even that hungry. I was just in a rush.) With 20 minutes of break time left, I thought, “Why not close my eyes for a few minutes?” Twenty blessed minutes later, I woke up like I’d been upgraded from 1% battery to 80%. I was alert, productive, and much to my horror, I realised I had become my father.
The term “catnap” is oddly accurate. Cats are the undisputed nap champions of the animal kingdom. They can sleep anywhere, on anything, in any position. They nap so much, I sometimes wonder if their real lives take place in dreams and we’re just extras in their waking world. A proper catnap is short, sweet, and deceptively powerful. Twenty minutes is the magic number—it’s long enough to rest your brain, but not so long that you wake up confused about what year it is or why your laptop is open to emails from three hours ago.
Here’s how the lunchtime catnap formula: EF + SF = WR
- EF – Eat fast. You’re not here for a Michelin-star experience. You’re here for fuel.
- SF – Sleep faster. Ideally, you’re asleep before your coworkers realise you’ve vanished.
- WR – Wake refreshed. No one will suspect you were just in a mini-coma. In fact, you might be more productive than the people who spent lunch doom-scrolling on their phones.
It’s like hitting “refresh” on your brain’s browser tab, except instead of clearing cookies, you clear existential dread. So now I understand. The older generation wasn’t weird—they were geniuses. They hacked the system. Forget coffee. Forget energy drinks. A twenty-minute catnap is the ultimate life cheat code.
FrogDiva Thoughts 