I wish I could say I have always understood the value of rest, but the truth is almost the opposite.
I am usually the person who becomes restless when someone else is doing nothing. Whenever my sister spent too long sitting around, I was the one pushing her to get up, go somewhere, make a plan, or at least find something “useful” to do. The simple sight of her resting could make me annoyed, as though her inactivity were somehow wasting not only her time but mine.
I applied the same rules to myself. Once, while traveling by train, I closed my eyes for a few minutes and immediately felt guilty. I could have been preparing for my next lecture, I thought, or at least answering the messages waiting on my phone. Even on a moving train, between one obligation and the next, rest felt like something I needed to justify.
That is the mindset I carried with me to Bronchales, a small village in Spain where I stayed with my friend’s family. I expected life there to be a little slower than mine, but I did not expect an entire household to pause at the same time every afternoon—or to do it without the smallest sign of guilt.
In Bronchales, the afternoon had its own rhythm
My friend’s family did not necessarily sleep during their siesta. After lunch, they would gather to watch television together. It happened at around the same point every day and felt less like a spontaneous decision than a natural part of the household’s rhythm. Nobody formally announced that it was time to rest. They simply stopped doing everything else.
I did not speak much Spanish, and my friend’s mother did not speak much English. Still, my friend had warned me that her mother could make herself understood regardless of the language in the room, and she was right. When I asked, somewhat clumsily, what was happening, a few gestures and shared words were enough: this is what we do now. You can join us or not, but the day is not going to keep rushing forward simply because there are still things that could be done.
What surprised me was not that they rested. It was that there was no negotiation around it. Nobody listed everything they had already accomplished that morning to prove they deserved the break. Nobody promised to make up for it later. Nobody appeared bothered by the possibility that somewhere, something remained unfinished.
In the environment I was used to, rest had to be earned, explained, or apologized for. In that home in Bronchales, it was simply part of the day.
A rest I had not planned still became a rest
I want to be careful not to turn one family’s routine into a description of an entire country. The idea that everyone in Spain disappears for a long afternoon nap is an easy cultural stereotype, and real schedules are obviously more complicated than that. Still, Spain’s association with the siesta comes from a genuine tradition of organizing the day differently, particularly in places where the afternoon pace has not been completely reshaped around uninterrupted working hours.
Bronchales made that difference visible to me. Sitting with my friend’s family and half following a Spanish television program I barely understood, I experienced a kind of calm I rarely allow myself at home. I was not sleeping, producing anything, preparing for anything, or even replying to anyone. For once, there was no need to convert a free hour into progress.
What made the experience especially uncomfortable—in a useful way—was realizing how often I had denied that same freedom to myself and quietly judged other people for taking it. I thought of all the times I had looked at my sister sitting peacefully and immediately wanted her to do something. Why had stillness always looked so wrong to me?
My body had not agreed to my productivity rules
Chronobiology offers at least part of the answer, and it suggests that the afternoon drop in energy is not simply a bad habit caused by laziness or a heavy lunch. Charles Czeisler, who chairs the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, describes the early-to-mid afternoon as a genuine dip in the body’s alertness cycle. At this point, the pressure to sleep has been building since morning, while the circadian signal that helps us remain alert has not yet strengthened enough to fully counteract it.
Czeisler calls this period “a great time for a nap.” In other words, the feeling I had trained myself to interpret as a failure of discipline was a predictable feature of the internal clock. It can occur whether or not someone has eaten lunch, had coffee, or grown up in a culture with a protected afternoon rest period.
A more recent review from La Trobe University, led by researcher Omar Boukhris, looked at napping specifically in athletes and physically active people, and found that timing mattered for performance in short-burst efforts like sprinting: “The most beneficial naps were those taken in the early afternoon,” Boukhris found. That timing lines up almost exactly with when the traditional siesta happens, and almost exactly with the hour Ali’s household reorganized around without ever citing a study to justify it — though his findings speak most directly to athletic performance rather than daytime alertness generally.
The internal clock exists whether a culture respects it or not
Sleep researcher Sara Mednick of the University of California, Irvine, has studied napping in places where it is an ordinary part of the day rather than a private indulgence squeezed between responsibilities. As she explains, “It’s an interesting thought that where napping is a culturally embedded practice, nappers do better.”
The biological dip does not disappear in cultures that prize constant productivity. What changes is the way people respond to it. Some daily routines leave space for the body’s rhythm, while others require people to override it with caffeine, willpower, and a sense of guilt.
Nobody in my friend’s home needed to fight the afternoon decline in alertness so they could appear busy. The household’s schedule already left room for it. In other places, we experience the same tiredness but treat it as an individual flaw: a focus problem, a motivation problem, or evidence that we have not managed our time well enough.
My own schedule still has no siesta built into it
Most of my days are divided between research, preparing lectures, teaching, and writing. None of these responsibilities comes with a protected afternoon pause. Early afternoon is often precisely when I need to lecture, work through a demanding task, or respond to someone. The dip does not get to announce itself as openly as it did in Bronchales. It becomes a slightly slower hour of work, followed by frustration with myself for not concentrating better.
Even the train felt like a workplace to me. Closing my eyes should have been one of the most natural things I could do while sitting between destinations. Instead, I mentally opened a list of alternatives: prepare for the lecture, answer messages, read something, do anything that could prove the time had not been wasted.
Bronchales did not magically remove that instinct. But it made it visible. I began to understand that what I had considered personal discipline was sometimes just an inability to let either myself or the people around me be still.
What I do with my two o’clock now
I have not become someone who takes a daily nap, and I still catch myself trying to turn every quiet moment into an opportunity to finish something. One stay in Spain was never going to undo years of thinking that rest must be deserved.
But I no longer see the afternoon crash as automatic evidence that I am lazy or falling behind. When it arrives, I think of that home in Bronchales: the television playing, the family gathered together, and nobody looking for a reason to feel bad about pausing.
Sometimes I step away from my screen for ten minutes. Sometimes I close my eyes without first completing one more task. And I am trying to stop treating someone else’s stillness—especially my sister’s—as a problem that needs to be corrected.
Ten quiet minutes are not quite a Spanish siesta. But they are ten minutes I used to spend arguing with my own body, and perhaps that is where learning to rest has to begin.
